# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1863_S204
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

simplicity, despite its indisputability, still today seems not even to have come to general recognition among our natural scientists."

Pitiable witnesses of materialistic doctrine! We would have to pity poor Yuka, if Pizarro's monk demonstrated his incapacity to be a teacher of the Christian faith by failing to instruct that unhappy prince any better concerning the supposed contradiction between the death of Jesus and the immortality of God. We must in any case pity a German doctor of philosophy, raised within Christendom, who remains caught in a contradiction that a schoolboy instructed in the catechism could have resolved for him — namely, that it is only on account of the personal union of the divine and human natures in Christ that the death of the man Jesus is also predicated of God, who himself can never die. Striking, however, is the fact that that Yuka not only sensed but expressed clearly enough the great truth supposedly discovered in the nineteenth century. One is led from the outset to the conjecture that his insight, and that of our researchers, regarding the immortality of matter, rests on the same ground — namely, on the assertion that what has not happened hitherto will also never happen in any future. This conjecture will prove correct. But if the assertion is correct, to what end then the attacks on Christianity? If it has not been able to be destroyed thus far, then the same prognosis is given to it, that it will exist forever! — Now what is the deeply felt truth hinted at in the second testimony? Without doubt Dr. Büchner means the doctrine that the soul is mortal, while the elements of the body are immortal. In his eagerness to bring even "the great Briton" onto the stage in the phalanx of the materialists, the author seems to have entirely overlooked the remarkable circumstance that Shakespeare, when he wished to portray his Hamlet in full possession of his reason — namely, at the appearance of his deceased father — has him address the friends who wish to keep him from following the beckoning spirit thus: "What is there to fear? I set my whole life at no more than a pin's worth. What harm can it (the ghost) do to my soul, which is as immortal as it is itself!" — whereas, by contrast, the words cited above are put by the poet into the mouth of the mad Hamlet. If, then, the materialists find their doctrine already hinted at by Shakespeare, they must also admit that he did not fail to indicate clearly enough that he counted their representatives among those unfortunate men whose reason has suffered shipwreck. In which we, for our part, gain the not unpleasant conviction that, in so important a matter, we know ourselves to be in complete agreement with the great poet. — Let us hear our author further.

"Matter is immortal, indestructible; not the smallest speck in the universe, however small or however great, can be lost, none can be added. We cannot even think away or think into existence the smallest atom, or we would have to