# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1863_S102
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

...inactive, over against matter — a notion whose impossibility we believe we have already demonstrated above. A resting, inactive creative power would be just as empty and untenable an abstraction as that of a force without matter at all." — Only to trusted friends will we say in confidence that we have deliberately left the sentence somewhat obscure, because it forms the crux of our proof, and that our argument rests on the two propositions: 1) matter already existed before its creation; 2) the creative power is the force or motion of matter, hence the created force. Should the creative power, then, have existed before the creation of the world, it would — since it is the motion of matter, and therefore cannot move without matter — have had to hold itself, in perfect rest and inertia, inactive over against matter, until it had entered into matter in order to create it. Matter, on the other hand, would have been, over against the force, formless and either motionless or powerless; and we have demonstrated that powerless matter would then instantly annul itself and dissolve without trace into the void of space. It could not, then, have already existed before its creation, and the creative power would then not be the motion of matter or the created force. It is thus proved that God could not have existed before the creation. — "Afterward it could not exist or continue to exist, since rest and inactivity are again incompatible with the concept of such a power, and it would then govern itself. The motion of matter follows solely the laws which are active within it itself," — One need only apply everything correctly in its proper place, and even a man can succeed at it. When above we were obliged to explain force, we could maintain our position against the God-ideas only by the fortunate expedient of hitting upon the notion that all motion of matter passes by contagion from one body to another. Here, against that same tiresome idea, only a contrary assertion can lead us to our goal, namely: the motion of matter passes solely from the living and active laws lodged in each piece of matter onto the matter itself. — "and the modes of appearance of things are nothing further than products of the various and manifold, contingent or necessary, combinations of material motions among one another. Never and nowhere, at no time, and not even into the most distant reaches to which our telescope penetrates, could any fact be established which would constitute an exception to this rule," — for we have at all times and everywhere found, with our telescope, the active laws sitting within matter, — "which would make the assumption of an independently and, apart from things, operating" — and thereby matter-moving — "self-subsisting force necessary. But a force which does not manifest itself cannot exist." — Only the so necessary repetition of this thought makes it necessary to remind once more that we already, in order to deal the death-blow to the God-idea, brought it to evidence at the magnet, that in the middle of the same