# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1863_S103
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Materialism, or the So-Called Results of Modern Natural Science. 103

a force which does not manifest itself exists in fullest energy. — "— To imagine this same force sunk in eternal rest, satisfied in itself, or in inner self-contemplation — runs once again straight into an empty and arbitrary abstraction without empirical basis." — Let one not forget, however, that we have the privilege of forbidding anyone, for instance, from declaring our own force — which clings inactive in the middle of the magnet, and which therefore without doubt lies sunk in in a rest satisfied in itself, or in inner self-contemplation — to be an empty and arbitrary abstraction without empirical basis. — "So there would remain only a third possibility, that is, the notion, as peculiar as it is unnecessary, that the creative power suddenly, and without known occasion, emerged out of nothing, and created the world (out of what?)" — This question — out of what? — I, the investigator Dr. Büchner, place here on purpose, for we materialists, in order to be able to combat the God-idea successfully, must always act as though "to create" meant not: to bring about that something is which before was not, but rather: to combine what already exists in a new way. This confusion has already rendered us considerable service. — "and that, with the moment of its completion, it sank back again into itself, gave itself over, so to speak, to the world, dissolved itself in the All. Philosophers and non-philosophers" — we name no names, for reasons easy enough to guess — "have from of old treated this notion, and particularly the latter part of it, with predilection, because in this way they believed they could unite the all-too-indisputable fact of a once-established and unalterable world-order with the belief in an individual, creative principle." — Only every assertion used in its right place — as has already been said — helps unbelievably much. Here it serves our purpose admirably when we declare a once-established world-order to be a fact that is all too indisputable. At another point, in order to be able to deny some reference to God that might lie therein, it will become quite easy for us to dispute such a fact and to demonstrate how such a notion runs out into nothing but an empty and arbitrary abstraction without empirical basis. For how should the particles of matter acknowledge anything that established an order for them, since each of them follows solely its own laws, as we have already proved, and should these very laws be that once-established order itself, then this one-time establishing can fall neither before their beginning — for they were from eternity — nor at their beginning — for they have none — nor after their beginning — for they were from eternity what they are. — "All religious notions, too, lean more or less upon this idea, only with the difference that they think of the world-spirit, after the creation, as indeed at rest" — for untruths are often put to very good use — "yet as an individual, who can at any time again abolish the laws he has given. Notions of this latter kind can occupy us no further." — for with the concept of God, which we actually wish to destroy, but which peculiarly...