# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1863_S68
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

68  Materialism, or the So-Called Results of Modern Natural Science.

compelled to let a correct judgment on this doctrine be talked out of him, even should he be as little acquainted with the observatory and the chemical laboratory of the nineteenth century as Epicurus himself was. For since the materialists, according to their own principles, cannot pass off the system of that old heathen philosopher as the revelation of a God that could only now, in a natural way, be discovered through human reason, after the new and grand acquisitions of the modern age have come to light, they must also not refuse to admit that whoever takes only the nature that lay before Epicurus, and that still lies before all men today, as the basis of rational reflection upon it, must arrive at the very same results to which the most exact knowledge and use of those acquisitions leads. The latter, therefore, stand on the very same footing as the facts that everyone has before his eyes, and knowledge of them is not essential or necessary for a correct assessment of materialism.

We choose as our guide into the treasure-chamber of materialistic knowledge a work which, as its author says, has met with such extraordinary success that several editions were required within a few months. We choose it, not as though it could in itself claim the standing of a scientific authority, but for the sake of its popular bent and influence. It bears the title: Force and Matter. Empirico-Natural-Philosophical Studies. Presented in a Generally Intelligible Form by Dr. Louis Büchner of Darmstadt. Third, enlarged edition, furnished with a second preface. Frankfurt am Main, published by Meidinger Sohn und Comp., 1856, LIV and 313 pages.

In it the subject matter is divided under the following more specific headings: Force and Matter — Immortality of Matter — Infinity of Matter — Dignity of Matter — The Unalterability of the Laws of Nature — The Universality of the Laws of Nature — The Heavens — Periods of the Earth's Creation — Spontaneous Generation — Purposefulness in Nature — Brain and Soul — Thought — Seat of the Soul — Innate Ideas — The Idea of God — Personal Continuance — Vital Force — The Animal Soul — Free Will — Concluding Reflections.

I. Force and Matter.

This chapter is the most important; it contains the foundation on which the whole edifice of materialism rests. In it we are to be shown the noblest pearl of human science, the most hidden and ultimate point which human inquiry has established, with the discovery of which a new view of the world — one that casts all previous views into the shade — has opened itself to the initiated, and against which every resistance must prove powerless. "Proceeding from the recognition of that immovable relationship between force and matter as insepara-