# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1863_S77
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Materialism, or the So-Called Results of Modern Natural Science. 77

are compelled to deny a soul even to man, we cannot endow particles of matter with souls — this change in the state of aggregation, then, actually exists only for the observer who, holding several particles in view at once, perceives the changing distances in the particles' position relative to one another. That must not, however, keep us from projecting into the particles themselves these changing distances and directions, which exist only between and outside the particles, as their inalienable property. Indeed we must say that this mutual approaching and receding has, from eternity, been inseparably inherent in every particle of matter. For since it passes from one particle to another only by contagion, and there is thus no body that originally produced the change of place — otherwise we should have to assume a force that was not itself a change of place but rather brought it about, and we should end up with the absurd idea of calling in a God to explain nature — it follows that this contagion never had a beginning, and it is proven that the change of position, passing by contagion from one body to another, is inherent in every particle of matter as an inseparable property from eternity, and that this explanation of force is to be applied wherever force is spoken of. — Indeed, those men who, by discovering and setting forth the fundamental doctrines of materialism concerning force, have cast so bright a light on the understanding of the whole of nature deserve — to be set by mankind upon goose eggs [a mocking image: enthroned on something fit to shatter]. — Dr. Büchner continues:

„A force can no more exist without matter than sight can exist without an organ of sight, or thought without an organ of thought. „„It has never occurred to anyone,““ says Voigt, „„to maintain that the capacity for secretion could exist apart from the gland, or the capacity for contraction apart from the muscle fiber. The absurdidy (sic) [a misspelling in the original for Absurdität, "absurdity"] of such an idea is so striking that no one has even had the courage to think it of the organs named.““

The relation of force to matter is supposed to be the same as that of the gland's capacity for secretion to the gland itself, or of the muscle fiber's capacity for contraction to the muscle fiber itself. Now since, upon drying out, the gland loses its capacity for secretion and the muscle fiber loses its capacity for contraction, it follows — if the relation is indeed the same — that matter, too, can lose its force, so that matter can exist without force: a result that draws a line through the whole materialist argument from beginning to end. If anyone at all wishes to conceive of force without matter, or existing on its own, he will certainly not then be thinking of it as a capacity of matter. Further, force and matter are set in parallel with sight and the organ of sight, thought and the organ of thought. Apart from the fact that there is no organ of thought, and that in a sleeping person no seeing takes place, without his organ of sight for that reason „instantly crumbling into a formless