# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1863_S99
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Materialism, or the So-Called Results of Modern Natural Science. 99

their hollow pathos, their mythical jingle of phrases, as scientific realities, and can bring nothing against our sober philosophy but a cry of distress over the daily increasing emaciation of their high horse, and over the threatening collapse of their little wooden thrones, which begin to totter as soon as we step forward — thrones from whose height these gentlemen have hitherto been accustomed to parade their philosophical phantom-pictures before the eyes of the astonished public, and to prescribe to their age each time how it is to think about God and the world. It is especially necessary to flatter the clumsy crowd and to declare: our assertions, which are really facts that only stupidity can deny, are self-evident to every clear-thinking educated person; whoever cannot see them stands still on a level of education which does not enable him to weigh the results of research we have presented. What of it? We must succeed! There are, after all, only a few people who seek to gain clear concepts about it by reflection, and should here and there someone find something incomprehensible, he will, if we only step forward boldly enough as men of science, believe that the fault lies with him, and, so as not to let that be noticed, will not dare to contradict our assertion. How many are there, after all, who stand here on their own feet? So, onward boldly! We must flood the book-market with our products, in which we explain to the curious crowd of the "educated," how we, animated by the welfare of mankind, have taken the trouble to offer them, in generally understandable form, something of what otherwise only that small number of the privileged enjoy who have worked their way through, by the energy of their spirit and the most strenuous industry, into the very sanctuary of science, at whose threshold the full, bright, uplifting light of knowledge at once shines forth to meet them, before whose radiance all the mists and shadow-pictures of ignorance, all the offspring of delusion and darkness, all the ghosts and shadow-shapes of superstition flee like goblins. If it is then thrown up against us from a certain quarter that "we are really nothing but a rabble of carters, who haul about and peddle the refuse and offal of natural science of every sort in books and journals throughout the land," that must not keep us from pursuing our goal. Boldness and impudence must remain our watchword. We cannot proceed as the genuine researcher does, who, before he sets up a definite assertion, reflects and tests again and again whether he indeed has firm ground under his feet. We must, on the contrary, force recognition as researchers through bold assertions that cause astonishment. For our striving is directed toward the annihilation of the idea of God, not toward the clarification of dark points in the field of knowledge. If in doing so we do not hit the nail on the head, we still hit near it, and that is, given how men are, fortunately the same thing for our purpose. Most of them, after all, do not see sharply enough to