# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1863_S72
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

-tian, when he tastes of it, stirs up the anxious thought that his faith might, after all, be built on nothing but sand!! —

After the principle of materialism has, in the foregoing propositions, been set forth and confirmed and explained by scientific witnesses, there now follows the proof of its correctness, in that it is shown by what path one must reliably arrive at the knowledge of this truth. Our author continues: "No force without matter — no matter without force! The one is as little conceivable by itself as the other by itself; taken apart from one another, both dissolve into empty abstractions. Imagine matter without force — the smallest particles of which a body consists — without that system of mutual attraction and repulsion which holds them together and gives the body form and shape; imagine the so-called molecular forces of cohesion and affinity taken away — what would and must be the consequence? Matter would instantly dissolve into a formless nothing. In the sensible world we know no example of any particle of matter that is not endowed with forces" — (that is, experience knows nothing in which one could not distinguish gift, giver, and the thing endowed — which three, however, according to what precedes, are nothing and at the same time one; that is the trinity of the materialist idol called matter) — "and by means of these forces it plays the role assigned to it" (by whom?) "now in this, now in that configuration, now in combination with like particles, now in combination with unlike particles of matter. But even ideally we are in no way able to form a conception of a forceless matter. However we may conceive of a primal matter, there would always have to be a system of mutual attraction and repulsion among its smallest particles, without which they would have to cancel themselves out and dissolve without trace into the void of space." "A thing without properties is an absurdity, neither conceivable according to reason nor present in nature according to experience" (Drossbach.)

To demonstrate the correctness of the proposition "No force without matter!" — on which everything here depends — proof is first offered of the proposition in its converse form: no matter without force! Since the latter proposition, in its whole content, can be granted by anyone who wishes, without such a person being in the least hindered thereby from rejecting the former in its whole content, and from setting up alongside it the proposition that would shatter the entire materialist system, namely: no spirit without force! — we may therefore let it stand, together with its argument, entirely unchallenged, the more so as we gladly avoid prolixity. The execution of the proof is, however, so rich in unfortunate ideas, so well suited to illuminate the thinking power of the materialists, that we permit ourselves to add at least one remark. To convince ourselves that there is no matter without force, we are called upon to conceive of matter without force. Very well, we do so. What is now the consequence? Will matter instantly dissolve into nothing? By no means.