# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1863_S206
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

it in express words by means of his senses. If the constitution of the world, understood without divine art, is
taken as the only true and rightly perceived one, then let the truth be
confessed in every part: let the world be declared wholly planless and
purposeless; let the knowledge of a harmoniously ordered whole, of an
order of the world, be declared a pure product of human fancy that gives
no true picture of what the world is and how it really is. Why does one not
do this? Why does the atheist, when he expresses himself on this subject,
use the language of the teleologists and theologians? Because, if he wished
to speak of it in a manner corresponding to materialism and atheism, every
reasonable person would take him for a fool. In order, then, to gain
entrance for the most pernicious of all doctrines into men's minds, it is
mixed with correct insights and noble and true thoughts in such a way
that the destroyer of all reason and morality wins for itself respect and a
hearing, without which it could not ensnare the senses of the credulous.
According to the teaching of the materialists, there can be no other
necessity in the whole of nature than that of the individual action of each
particle of matter, which it must, according to its own nature, produce in
that combination with other particles of matter into which it was hurled
wholly planlessly and purposelessly by purely material activity. If the
materialist also asserts the necessity that such an accumulation of great
masses of matter should occur in spatial separation as keeps these masses
in perfect equilibrium, then he must admit that, according to his own
teaching, this accumulation could only have been brought about in such a
way that the particles of matter themselves gave up their own working
according to natural necessity, in order to take counsel and unite for the
joint execution of purposes requiring an equilibrium of substances, to
divide among themselves the operations required for this, and then to
betake themselves to their corresponding places in the universe! —

We will at once touch on another thought that lies close at hand here.
One can raise the following objection against us. For the correct and
complete comprehension of nature we have no need at all of that necessity
which presupposes an intention. Substances undeniably exist. They possess
forces and stand in connection and interaction. The possibility cannot,
then, be denied that they fell, without any divine art, into some
combination or other, and that this combination, having arisen quite by
chance, can appear to us exactly as purposeful as we now know the world
to be. Other combinations, to be sure, might also have formed, which
would have offered less the appearance of purposefulness; but we are
compelled by no reason to assume that the actual combination — which was
just as possible without divine art as any other — could only have arisen
through art. To this we will let a famous astronomer make answer, and
indeed by an example chosen out of countless others. Laplace writes in his
Essai philosophique sur les probabilités, page 104: "One of the most
remarkable phenomena of the solar system is that of the agreement