# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1863_S100
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

recognize where the blow actually falls; dazzled by our scientific language, which conceals the incoherence of our assertions, they think the object of their faith has really been struck, fall into scruples, grow uneasy and fainthearted in their faith — our standing has risen, and with it our influence. The others, who in any case do not care to occupy themselves with God, are all the more kept back by our appearing on the scene from turning any earnest thought to the preaching of faith in God. Therefore let us only boldly set up some senseless concept of God, even should no man ever yet have held it. This concept we must illuminate from every side and under all possible suppositions, so that all the nonsense contained in it may come to light, and at the same time, with all the boldness at our command, through twists and turnings, produce in the reader the impression that this is granting him an insight into the faultiness of his own notions of the divine being. Any objections the reader might raise we strike down once and for all with the remark: the concept we have illuminated is the only one that has scientific significance and follows a philosophical mode of thought. If the reader has some other concept, then a scientifically educated mind cannot occupy itself with it, since that other concept transfers merely individual human properties and imperfections onto abstract notions. Some such phrase will here do the same service.

Researcher Büchner continues:

"What general consequence can be drawn from this insight?

That those who speak of a creative force" — and commit the folly of conceiving either the abstraction present merely in their own head as existing before the world, or else the force of matter as the creative force — "who are supposed to have brought forth the world out of themselves or out of nothing, are unacquainted with the first and simplest principle of a philosophical and empirically grounded view of nature. How could a force have existed which does not manifest itself in matter itself, but rather governs matter arbitrarily and according to individual considerations?" — Yet there exists in me, the researcher Dr. Büchner himself, just such a force, which governs concepts not only arbitrarily and according to individual considerations, but even combines them in a senseless manner, without this senseless force itself manifesting as a property of the concepts! — "Just as little could separately existing forces transfer themselves into formless and lawless matter and thereby generate the world. For we have seen that a separate existence of these two belongs among the impossibilities. That the world could not have arisen out of nothing, a later consideration, dealing with the immortality of matter, will teach us. A nothing is not merely a logical but also an empirical absurdity. The world, or matter with its properties, which we call forces, had to be from eternity and will have to be for eternity — in a word: the world can