# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1863_S71
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Materialism, or the So-Called Results of Modern Natural Science. 71

matter which does not exist, then force waits in vain ever to be the property of a thing, or to be thought of as such. Moreover, since the presupposition is mutual — matter presupposes force, but force presupposes matter, and matter again presupposes force, and so on into infinity — the two never actually come together in reality, nor, if the condition of mutual presupposition is to be fulfilled, can they ever be thought together. For this condition consists in this: if you wish to have the true concept of things as they are, then think of matter before force and force before matter — only in this mutual presupposition do these abstractions yield the correct picture. Should the reader succeed in this, we would gladly grant him to have come to know the nature of things as held by the materialists. — "Force and matter, taken separately, have no subsistence." If, then, neither of the two exists in and of itself, how can their togetherness — the togetherness of things that do not exist — become or be the ground of their existence? A shadow is nothing in and of itself; but it is present when an object is there to which it clings. Now if this object, like the matter of the materialists, is such a thing that one must say of it, "there is no such thing," will the shadow, joined to such a thing, then "have subsistence"? Hardly — unless it were of the kind of shadow that Peter Schlemihl bargained away to Mephistopheles. — "Force is the inseparable property of matter, inherent in it from eternity." If these words have a meaning, it is this: force can never be separated from the matter to which it belongs. If it is inherent in matter from eternity, then it has never gone forth from it to act upon other matter. But it is further asserted: "Nothing in the world entitles us to presuppose the existence of forces without bodies from which they proceed." Do the forces, then, not behave "like horses that are now harnessed to a cart, now unharnessed," but rather — to draw together briefly the result of the whole inquiry — do they behave, beyond doubt, like horses that 1. use matter as a stable, going in and out of it; 2. are merely properties of their stable; 3. are inseparably bound up with their stable and dwell in it from eternity; and 4. all this at once, in such a way that neither they nor their stable exist.

The reader should not grow impatient if the insight now gained into what force and matter are should not fully satisfy him. Let him consider that, even should some deficiencies still cling to it, what has been offered him here is nonetheless that spiritual nourishment which the mass of educated persons of the German tongue, in the old fatherland and the new — exceptions aside — take into themselves with great satisfaction as the highest achievement of the human spirit, after partaking of which they feel themselves exalted far above the common crowd that still believes in God and the Bible, and with a contemptuous smile wave away the eternal goods which the Gospel offers — nourishment which, even in many a sincere Chris-