# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1863_S75
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Materialism, or the So-Called Results of Modern Natural Science. 75

which the rose consists, which in their totality, in this combination, are called and are this rose, are the same from eternity, have the same forces, i.e. the properties coming into appearance in that combination, inherent in it from eternity, and must therefore forever come into appearance with the same properties that we now see in the rose! — This one example may suffice to show what sort of explanation of nature and natural science would result if one wished to combine the assertions of the materialists in a consistent way of thinking and apply them to natural objects.

""For this reason," it now continues, "forces cannot, as Mulder rightly explains, be communicated, but only awakened. Magnetism cannot, as it might well seem, be transferred, but only called forth, unlocked, by our changing the states of aggregation of its medium. The magnetic forces adhere to the molecules of the iron, and they are, e.g., strongest at precisely the point on a magnet bar where they are least, or not at all, noticeable outwardly" — (so there are forces even where they are not noticeable at all! A dangerous statement for the materialist!) — "that is, in the middle. Let one imagine an electricity, a magnetism, without the iron or without those bodies in which we have observed the manifestations of these forces, without those particles of matter whose mutual molecular behavior is precisely the cause of these phenomena; nothing would be left to us but a formless concept, an empty abstraction, to which we have given a name of its own only in order to come to a better understanding of this concept among ourselves. Had there never been particles of matter capable of being put into an electrical state, then there would also never have been an electricity, and with the sole aid of abstraction we would never have been able to attain the slightest knowledge or notion of electricity. Indeed, one must say, it would never have existed without these particles! All so-called imponderables — heat, light, electricity, magnetism, and so on — are nothing more and nothing less than changes in the states of aggregation of matter — changes which pass from one body to another by a kind of contagion. Heat is a moving-apart of the smallest particles of matter, cold a moving-together of the same; light and sound are vibrating, wave-like moving bodies. ""The electrical and magnetic phenomena," says Czolbe (New Presentation of Sensualism, 1855), "arise, like light and heat, by experience, through the mutual relations of bodies, molecules, and atoms." For these reasons the aforesaid investigators rightly define force as a mere property of substance."

Two thoughts there are which, in these propositions, are added as further proof for the assertion that force is a mere property of matter, to the above