# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1863_S78
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

Nothing, dissolving tracelessly into the expanse of space,“ which would indeed have to happen if force and matter behaved exactly as sight and the organ of sight do — the very word "apparatus" already knocks materialism to the ground. For if matter is to be compared to an apparatus, then there must also be a force presiding over matter, which arranges its parts, according to a purpose lying outside them, into definite functions. — There now follows the sentence that crowns the whole explanation and grounding of the materialist principle. —

„Nothing has ever been able to give us information about the existence of a force except the changes we perceived by the senses in matter, and which, by subsuming them under fixed names according to their resemblances, we designated by the word 'forces'; any knowledge of them by any other way is an impossibility.“

The sensibly perceptible changes in matter are not brought about by forces; they are not the effects of any causes whatsoever, but are themselves the forces and causes, being, as such, properties inherent in matter and present from eternity. The fact that an apple is green today and, after some time, is no longer green but yellow — this sensibly perceptible change, which did not exist at all last year — has nevertheless been present from eternity as an inherent property, and from this it follows that force is, after all, only a property of matter! The particles of matter composing the apple are, and reliably remain, the very same things, whether they travel the circuit of the world on the apple tree together with mother earth, are carried off as dried fruit by the wheel of a railway car thundering along the rails, or run as cider over the tongue of a poet (Dübois-Raymond). But they possess a property inherent in them from eternity, called sensibly perceptible change. From this it follows that force can only be a property of matter. Here, naturally, all thinking stops. The preachers of materialism demand — as must be clear to anyone who reasonably considers the foregoing exposition, without further exemplification — from their "educated public" a complete slaying of reason and a slavish submission of belief to the most senseless assertions. And this submission is rendered to them most willingly by thousands. For God, whose existence the enlightened of our age claim they must deny for reason's sake — because they no longer wish to obey him — for that very reason, by a just judgment, lets them be taken captive in slavish subjection to fools, their reason held under the obedience of unreason and nonsense.

Every speculation about nature must, if it is to have any worth, seek such an arrangement of clearly grasped concepts as represents the existent, the real in nature, in the way it underlies what happens and appears, and so makes this happening and appearing comprehensible. Instead of that, we find here such a confusion of con-