# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1863_S101
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Materialism, or the So-Called Results of Modern Natural Science. 101

...could not have been created. To be sure, the concept "Eternal" is one that "squares only with difficulty with our finite powers of understanding" — finite powers of understanding which, however, as just said, are themselves from eternity, hence infinite; for spirit does not exist, all force being a property of matter — "seems to bear, since we are unable to represent it to ourselves; nonetheless the facts leave us" — facts which are, to be sure, unknown to us, which is why we put false conclusions in their place — "no doubt as to the eternity of the world. — In how many other respects still the notion of an individual creative power suffers from absurdities, we shall become aware several times in the course of our later considerations. — That the world is not governed, as one is indeed accustomed here and there to express it, but that the motions of matter obey a perfect natural necessity grounded in matter itself, from which there is no exception" — for even my own pen I, the investigator Dr. Büchner, could not govern, in order through it to make known to the world the results of my research; rather, in its motions it obeyed solely the natural necessity grounded in itself — "which educated person, and particularly which person even superficially acquainted with the acquisitions of the natural sciences, would today wish to doubt this truth? But that a force — to use this expression once in the abstract — can be a force, can exist at all, only when and so long as it finds itself in activity" — naturally with the exception that a force can also be a force, can also exist, when and so long as it does not find itself in activity, because one can wake it from its slumber, call it forth from its rest into activity, as was sufficiently explained above in the case of magnetism — "must be no less clear. If one wished, then, to conceive of a creative power, an absolute potency, a primal soul, an unknown X — no matter what name one gives it — as the cause of the world, one would then have to say of it, applying the concept of time to it, that it could exist neither before nor after the creation. Beforehand it could not have existed, since the concept of such a power cannot square with the idea of nothing or of inactivity." — One is only asked not to forget, since we need this for the confirmation of other truths, that a force can be strongest precisely where it is not noticeable at all, where it does nothing at all — that the concept of a force can therefore square very well with the idea of nothing or of inactivity, as we already found confirmed in the case of magnetism. — "A creative power could not have existed without creating;" — only let one not forget, as has been said, that the attractive force of the magnet is strongest precisely where it does not attract at all, that is, in the middle, and that I, the investigator Dr. Büchner, also have the power to chop wood, yet it chops no wood — rather, I do the research — "one would then have to imagine that it held itself, in perfect rest and inertia, over against formless and motionless matter" — matter which, of course, already existed before its creation — "inactive for a time...