# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1863_S105
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Materialism, or the So-Called Results of Modern Natural Science. 105

to testify with the Psalmist: The heavens declare the glory
of God, and the firmament sheweth his handywork!

As can be sufficiently seen from what has gone before, how the
attempt, from the principle that force is merely a property of matter, to
deny the existence of God, was bound to fail utterly, because it is unable
to touch the actual object of its attack at all, but can only lose itself in
a circular motion of its own nonsense and self-contradiction; and since the
concepts of the uncreatability and immortality of matter, of natural
necessity and of the laws of nature, which were called in to help in this
attempt, will receive detailed treatment in the following chapters, we will
close our remarks on the first chapter of the materialistic doctrine with a
reference to Epicurus.

The most general outlines of Epicurus's doctrine are expressed in
three propositions: that the sole source of the knowledge of truth is
sense-perception; that the sole existing thing is the multitude of material
atoms; and that the sole thing to be exclusively striven for by man is
pleasure. The reader has by now doubtless recognized the first two
propositions as the foundations of the materialistic argument set forth
above concerning the relation of force and matter, and has seen that it
is the assertion of these old propositions, and not the spread of some
newly won knowledge gained through great and splendid acquisitions of
the empirical sciences, that forms the motive of that argument. That the
third proposition is the real motive behind the establishing of the first
two, since they serve only the purpose of justifying the third, scarcely
needs demonstrating, even with regard to the materialists of our own
time. We cite in evidence but a single passage from the preface, in which
Dr. Büchner, with all the propriety that our present age still demands,
lays bare the goal of the materialists' striving. He says: "The more we
emancipate ourselves from dependence on all powers or hopes standing
outside ourselves, the more, alongside the consciousness of our own
greatness (!), must the wish fill us to arrange our life as usefully and as
pleasurably (!) as possible — as ideally, that is, as possible both for the
individual and for the community as a whole." The glory of their
doctrine being some great acquisition of the modern age is one the
materialists can claim only among the ignorant multitude. They do not
even have the merit of having been the first to give it scientific
expression. Epicurus himself already set it forth in scientific form and
scientific coherence, and that without the repellent morass of continual
conceptual confusion, of asserting what is denied and denying what is
asserted, which we find in the presentation of its modern representatives —
so much so that, set beside the old master, they appear like apes at
play. Compare with the presentation above, for instance, the following
passages, bearing on this chapter, from Epicurus's Letter to Herodotus,
in which he sketched