# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1863_S70
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

forces, like horses, are now harnessed, now unharnessed. A particle of iron is and remains reliably the same thing, whether it travels the circuit of the world in a meteoric stone, hurtles along the rails in a locomotive wheel, or courses through the blood-cell at the temple of a poet. — These properties are from eternity; they are inalienable, untransferable." (Dübois-Raymond).

"'Out of nothing no force can arise.' (Liebig)."

"'Nothing in the world entitles us to presuppose the existence of forces in and of themselves, without bodies from which they proceed and on which they act.' (Cotta)."

"With these words of recognized natural scientists we open a chapter which is meant to call to mind one of the simplest and most consequential truths — yet perhaps for that very reason among the least known and acknowledged — namely: no force without matter, no matter without force!"

Let us pause here to consider what insight into the nature of force and of matter, and into the relation in which they stand to one another, we have gained from these propositions. "Force is a property of matter," or of substance, for both words denote, in our author's usage, the same thing. Matter, then, is forceful, active — the active thing itself, the cause through which effects are brought about. But now it is further said: there is no matter. If there is no matter, then that which is real, of which the world consists, is something other than matter, and since only the real can be active, force, if it is a property, must be the property of that which is not matter — and the proposition "force is a property of matter" is false. Further, if there is no matter, how can matter be the foundation for force, how can it be that in which force has dwelt from eternity, to which it is bound? — "Force and matter," it is said, "are abstractions of things as they are, taken up from different points of view. They complement one another." So, seen from the one point of view, things are not matter but force; seen from the other, they are not force but matter. These two abstractions are now supposed to complement one another. That is impossible, for they cancel one another out. Whoever wishes to hold fast to the one thought cannot take up the other to complement it, but must reject it. Or is the sense of these words rather this: if we wish to have a correct concept of the thing as it is, must we in thought add matter to force and force to matter? We do so. What do we then have? We have thought of matter as something real, and force either as its property or as a second reality operative within matter. But we ought not to have done so, for there is neither matter nor force. Then we have nothing more than two unreal things thought together, and are just as far along as before. — "Force and matter presuppose one another." Certainly, the existence of a force presupposes a something that is forceful or active; is this something