# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1863_S106
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

of his entire philosophy, and which we communicate after the first
German translation of Diogenes Laertius, Leipzig, Schwikert,
1806: "Nothing comes from nothing, for otherwise everything would
come from everything, and there would be no need of any seed; and if
that which vanishes from under its form were dissolved into nothing, all
things would already have been destroyed, if the elements into which
they dissolve did not continue to exist. Now the universe has always
been eternally as it now is, and will eternally continue so to be, because
there is nothing into which it could be transformed; for outside the
whole there is nothing that could penetrate into it and bring about a
transformation." "The atoms are in constant motion, and are partly far
removed from one another, and partly, through a similar motion, come
into connection with one another, whereupon these new connections meet
others in their path and hold them back. For the nature of empty
space, which separates every atom from every other, must bring this
about, since according to it, it would be impossible for solid bodies to
form out of the atoms. But the solidity peculiar to the atoms produces,
through the impact, a counter-motion, whose effect must finally be a
joining and combination. It is impossible to determine a beginning of
these combinations, since their causes, the atoms and empty space, have
always existed. — The color, too, is changed according to the position
of the atoms." "The soul, too, cannot be regarded as something
incorporeal. For the concept of the incorporeal holds only in the case of
empty space: but empty space can neither do anything nor suffer
anything, but merely grants bodies motion within itself; hence those
speak foolish nonsense who call the soul incorporeal; for it could neither
do anything nor suffer anything, if it were that; but now we plainly
observe both these phenomena in the soul." "As for shape, color, size,
weight, and the other predicates which either belong to a body merely by
chance, or belong to all bodies, or at least to those visible bodies
perceptible through sensation, one must not regard them as independent
beings existing in nature, for that is unthinkable, nor yet as nothing, or
as foreign, incorporeal things, or finally as parts of the body, but as a
whole together with the body — as that which has its own eternal
nature composed of all these, without which it could not exist, whether
more or fewer molecules combine in a body; in every case a whole
endowed with its own eternal nature will arise out of all these. In the
meantime, increases and decreases are conceivable everywhere; but once
such a combination has come about which has no further separation as
its purpose, then the whole receives, according to the conception of the
understanding, the predicate of a body."
"Further, one must not believe that the motion and turning of the
heavenly bodies, their eclipsing, their rising and setting, and all the
consequences bound up with these, occur through the service, or at the
command and ordinance