# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1863_S74
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

other sense than that of the cause of what happens — then here we unquestionably have forces. Now there can also be no doubt that a man can keep certain processes in his mind to himself, and does keep them, which then, just as little as the forces by which they were produced, come into appearance. If we now insert this fact into the above argument, the following conclusion will arise: since it is an exceptionless law that a force can only come into appearance in a substance, it follows that force can be nothing else and may not be defined otherwise than as a property of matter; and since it is a fact that there are forces that do not come into appearance in any substance, it follows that force cannot be, and may not be defined as, a property of matter, as an inseparable property inherent in it from eternity. This combination must show everyone at once that the argument is nothing more, and can be nothing more, than a fallacy. The proposition from which the principle of materialism is inferred is nothing but sheer prattle; for to come into appearance means nothing else than to become noticeable in some substance, and the proposition accordingly reads: it is an exceptionless law that a force can only become noticeable in a substance when it becomes noticeable in a substance. A force never itself "comes into appearance," but what appears is the substance. 3. If the materialists wanted to gain the proposition — that force is nothing but a property of substance — by correct inference, then the above propositions would have to be framed thus: Every force comes into appearance. But only the properties of substance come into appearance. Therefore forces can only be properties of substance. Here it would still remain doubtful whether there are properties that are not forces. This, however, is soon decided. Let one think of a blooming rose. Here we have substance, properties, and forces. What appears in the rose? Evidently only its properties, namely weight, cohesion of parts, shape, color, fragrance, smoothness and softness of the petals, the thorniness of the stem, etc. Were we to assume that this last property were not a force, we would have to presuppose a special force that formed these thorns. But now, according to the above, every force must come into appearance; yet a force that forms these thorns does not come into appearance beside and apart from, or within, the thorns themselves; therefore the property that alone comes into appearance must here be the force itself. The same thing is repeated with every perceptible property. From this it would necessarily follow that the forces of a substance are themselves the perceptible properties in it. These properties are then, if we are to believe the materialists, eternal, inseparably bound up with the substance, inherent in it from eternity. The rose has, then, bloomed from eternity. It cannot possibly be true that, when the chemist subjects the rose in a retort to distillation, the properties of the rose vanish, so that instead of the rose he then has gas, oil, water, acid, and coal. For the particles of matter, out of