# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1860_S185
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Toward the Grounding of a New Physico-Theology. 185

differ among themselves only by the greater or lesser degree of consistency — or rather, more correctly, of inconsistency — with which they carry their scientific views over into life. This is not too much said; even if a considerable part of German natural scientists does not share the frivolity of C. Vogt, the prophet of incarnate frivolous materialism, yet far more natural scientists sympathize and flirt with the same, secretly or openly, than is commonly believed. Fortunately, however, practical life itself, the inner experiences of the heart, form a corrective for theoretical views which, left to themselves, would have to work all the more perniciously and destructively on all social relations, on state and church, than they have, alas, already done. Faith in a revelation has its greatest enemy in a view of nature detached from all connection with the divine Creator. Rationalistic theism still left a bridge standing here, even if it did not itself cross it. Materialism severs the last bond; it extinguishes the last light that might still serve as a sparse beacon for finding the lost way again.

While almost the entire body of German scientific literature — especially the popular kind, which has flooded the book market in a manner that seemed scarcely possible — appears stripped of any higher consideration, or flatly denies a divine origin of nature, we find in one of the most comprehensive and magnificent works ever to appear on natural history, in Agassiz's Contributions to the Natural History of the United States, the following introductory words to the first, very important systematic part, which treats the most interesting problems of organic natural science, first of all of animal organization. It reads here:

"The division of the animal kingdom into branches, classes, orders, families, genera, and species, by which we express the results of our investigations concerning the relationships within the animal kingdom, and which constitute the first question of a scientific system of nature, seems to me to deserve the attention of every thoughtful mind. Are these divisions artificial or natural? Are they mere inventions of the human understanding for a better overview and for the easing of further investigations, or are they grounded in the divine intelligence and to be regarded, to be thought of, as categories of its own kind.... In my opinion, those systems which have been set up by the great leading voices of our science are, in fact, nothing but translations of the Creator's thoughts into human language. And if this is so, do we not find, in this capacity of the human understanding to make the facts of creation its own — whereby we instinctively and unconsciously become the interpreters of the thoughts of God — the most convincing proofs of our kinship with the spirit of God? Is not this intellectual connection with the almighty Creator worthy of our deepest consideration