# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1863_S203
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Materialism, or the So-Called Results of Modern Natural Science.        203

matter. — So farewell then, trusty reason! Madness is now queen, and folly's antics are coming into honor. As once, when Duke Astolfo of England, as Ariosto relates, journeyed to the moon, he found all the things which men on earth had lost, scattered about in a narrow, deep valley. There, among other fine things, he sees also — what we ourselves never once prayed for, so highly, as it were, is it blessed — I mean the understanding, which here, in quantity, alone seems to hold more than everything else put together. As a liquid, very volatile and very fine, which readily evaporates unless well sealed, it stands there in flasks, now large, now small, just as it had slipped away from its owner. Of all of them the largest seemed to be the one into which the great mind of the researcher had been poured; others were recognized without any trouble, for their inscription read: the understanding of the materialists, lost in the course of the great discoveries of the natural sciences of the nineteenth century.

Despite the evident absurdities into which scientific materialism plunges everyone who lets it pass for truth, let us go on with the assessment and elucidation of its doctrines. The great successes which that phalanx of natural scientists is achieving in our time prove most clearly that the semblance of science and truth enveloping their assertions is too dazzling for many to notice the unscientific character and irrationality lying bare behind it. To strip away this dazzling semblance from all the chief doctrines of so presumptuous and pernicious a heathen sect we may not, therefore, regard as an altogether useless and needless labor. In the chapter of the materialistic doctrine now before us, a scientific proof of the eternity of the world is offered, one which, through the advances of the natural sciences, is supposed to have been established as a magnificent acquisition of the modern age and an irrefutable fact. Let us then see what our researchers have found out in this matter.

First we are prepared for a worthy reception of so lofty a wisdom by a few utterances of older sages, to whom it was granted at least to sense something of the truth that had so long remained hidden. The author of our study has reached back three centuries and brings before us first a king of Peru, and then a deranged crown prince in a stage play, as witnesses. He begins thus:

"You worship a God who died upon the cross; I, however,
worship the sun, which never dies."
A Peruvian Inca, to a missionary.

"Great Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
stops up a hole against the rough north wind.
O, that the earth which once made the world tremble
should, against wind and weather, patch a wall." [echoing Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act V, Scene 1: "Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay..."]

With these deeply-felt words the great Briton already hinted, three hundred years ago, at a truth which, despite its clarity and