# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1863_S199
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Materialism, or the So-Called Results of Modern Natural Science. 199

of matter itself; that is, in other words and properly speaking, there is no power at all. Consequently there is no creative power either. If there is no creative power, then there is no Creator either. Now if someone objects: If there are no powers, then nothing happens either; whence then comes change? — he is answered: change is merely a shifting of the particles of matter in space, which propagates itself from one substance to another by a kind of contagion. But since every shifting and every kind of contagion is itself a change presupposing power, in that answer the questioner is given the wise reply: change is simply change and happens through change — and whoever is not made clear on the matter by this belongs among those unfortunate ones who "kick against the goad of the facts."

If nothing else came to the aid of the materialists, they would accomplish nothing with such utterly ridiculous deductions. What is really effective in the great successes of which they boast is the deep moral depravity of many people, which scientific materialism finds ready at hand. Whoever at any time did not want there to be a God has also sought reasons before the bar of reason to gloss over the corruption of the heart with a higher insight, and has then, in a lying manner, reversed the true state of affairs, representing the godlessness of the heart as the consequence of rational insight. We do not wish to decide whether that proof taken from the notion of power has the same origin; although we hold it to be impossible that a man, on the ground of such a web of ignorance and absurdity alone, could go about — fresh and cheerful, as befits a confessor of the truth — to mock the Creator, Redeemer, and Judge of the world as an empty figment of the brain. We know that, as a venerable man once expressed it, "half-learned sciences are a twilight whose pale glimmer does not suffice to draw the proper boundary between truth and error: they confuse the understanding even more than no knowledge at all." — Another ground, already made use of since ancient times, is the assertion, derived from the nature of things, of the eternity of the world, which is put forward in a peculiar form under the name of the immortality of matter by our materialist in the second chapter of his work. We will preface the inquiry with a few remarks.

There has probably never yet been a man who, in the contemplation of nature, with full consciousness denied the traces impressed upon it of the glorious divine attributes. The perversity of mankind is capable only of this much — of attributing the divine attributes and the divine honor, whose acknowledgment cannot be evaded, to creatures, "to perishable man, to the birds, to the four-footed and creeping beasts," as the sages of old, who became fools, did; to the filth on the