# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1863_S207
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Materialism, or the So-Called Results of Modern Natural Science. 207

of all the axial-rotation and orbital movements of the planets and
satellites with the axial rotation of the sun, and of the near coincidence of
the planes of their orbits with the plane of the solar equator. So
remarkable a phenomenon is not the effect of chance; it points to a
general cause which has determined all these movements. In order to
gain the probability with which this cause is here pointed to, let us note
that the planetary system, as we know it today, consists of eleven planets
and eighteen satellites. Known are the rotational movement of the sun, of
ten planets, of Jupiter's satellites, of Saturn's ring, and of one of its
satellites. These movements, together with those of the orbital motion,
form a whole of forty-three movements which describe their courses in
agreement with one another; or, one finds, by the calculus of
probabilities, that one may set more than four thousand
milliards (4,000,000,000,000) against one that this
arrangement is not the effect of chance; that constitutes
a far higher probability than that of historical
events, about which one allows oneself no doubt at
all. We must therefore believe, at the very least with the same assurance,
that a primal cause has assigned the planets their orbit, especially when
we consider that the inclination of the majority of these movements to the
solar equator is very small."

We add to this citation yet another, which relates to the same subject.
The St. Petersburg astronomer F. Th. Schubert says in his Theoretical
Astronomy, vol. III, p. 336: "It has already been noted elsewhere that an
essential distinction holds between the absolute and the positive, between
the necessary and the
arbitrary laws of nature. To the former belong not only

those without which a corporeal world could not exist at all, such as, for
example, impenetrability, but one may also reckon to them every general
law that is chosen out of several others — whether by chance, by
necessity, or by wisdom — on which, however, the essential constitution
of the world depends in such a way that from the abolition of such a law
another physics, another world, would arise: in a word, all laws that can
be expressed by a general theoretical proposition. But the individual
manner in which these general laws are applied, the arrangement of the
particular parts of the whole, the
scale according to which the plan is carried out, etc. — all that belongs
to the arbitrary or positive laws. The essential influence that the absolute
laws have on the whole of nature might justify the conclusion, not
infrequently drawn, that these laws are altogether indispensable to the
existence of a world that is not to destroy itself, and therefore have no
other lawgiver than necessity. It would follow from this, but only this,
that everything that can be derived from the absolute laws is the
consequence not of a free choice, but of a slavish