# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1863_S201
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Materialism, or the So-Called Results of Modern Natural Science.        201

surpasses all others must, in every respect, be an absolute being, wholly inaccessible to human concepts. Now if, in our contemplation of nature, we take away, along with the divine being, the divine attribute of eternity as well, then only a world remains, one that has come into being. At once such a gap arises in our thinking as no man is able to bear. How could the world come into being? Nothing could create no world, for it can do nothing, because it is nothing. Nor could the world have created itself, for before its coming into being it was nothing. We human beings are so constituted that, whether we will it or not, we must acknowledge eternity. If, then, despite this compulsion to acknowledge a divine being, we proceed to deny it, only one way out remains: to ascribe the divine attribute of eternity to the world instead.

If we do not do this, if we call God alone eternal, then indeed this being itself, as well as his activity, and the creation of the world in particular, remain incomprehensible; but we commit no absurdity, for it is not contrary to reason to predicate of a being who is not as the world is — the contemplation of which has enabled us to grasp, little by little through sustained diligence, what we have in fact grasped — something that must of necessity remain incomprehensible to us, and whose acknowledgment we cannot escape. At least the mind thereby gains the peace it needs, so as to be able to trace out those things which do not, like absolute beginninglessness, bear upon them the stamp of abiding inexplicability.

Whoever, on the other hand, takes that way out at once falls into so dense a forest of nonsense that he ought to feel compelled to renounce reason forever — reason which, instead of granting him light, has led him into impenetrable darkness. We shall at once demonstrate the correctness of this judgment by the example of the scientific materialists. These predicate the divine attribute of eternity of a small number of unconscious elements. According to the latest count known to me, there are sixty-three of them. The best known among them are lead, iron, gold, iodine, silicon, copper, nickel, phosphorus, mercury, sulfur, silver, zinc, and tin. Each of these substances exists in an infinite number of individual entities, atoms, which are perfectly alike. Besides these substances nothing whatever exists; they are the only real beings. The world is nothing but a varied accumulation of these same substances. "According to the present state of our knowledge of the world surrounding our earth," says Dr. Büchner, "we must declare that the same substances and the same laws of nature by which we see ourselves formed and surrounded here also compose the whole universe, and that these are everywhere active in the same manner and with the same necessity as in our own immediate vicinity. Sufficient proof of this astronomy and physics have furnished us in ample measure." These substances are unchangeable; they have been from eternity exactly as we now see them before us, and will so remain for all eternity. Hence it also happens that