# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1863_S208
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

necessity, and one sees at once that this inference cannot be extended
with the slightest semblance of justice to the positive laws. Since, now,
those laws properly constitute only the possible world, while an actual
world without these individual laws, without a determinate magnitude and
arrangement, is inconceivable: one had to leave the determination of
these positive laws, which observation has taught us, to chance, so as not
to be led back to a cause choosing with freedom and wisdom. But when
one now, after the world has continued for thousands of years without
disorder or confusion, discovers, through the most exact observations and
calculations, that precisely what we have called positive laws is the
source of this order; that these laws are determined or chosen exactly as
was necessary in order that the world might endure, not for thousands of
years, but for an eternity, in its present state — can one then still think of
chance, where everything shows intentions and plans so plainly? Can one
then still fail to recognize the infinite wisdom that cared no less for the
preservation of its work than for its beauty? — . . . . It would be out of
place here to carry these considerations further, easily as they could be
applied to our subject. Granting at once that the fundamental law of all
heavenly motions — the universal attraction of every mass, in the inverse
doubled ratio of the distance — is a work of necessity, since without it no
world could exist even for a short time; that consequently the laws
according to which the planets describe ellipses about the sun, and
according to which they mutually disturb one another in these orbits,
presuppose no legislating wisdom — granting this at once, although the
impossibility of other laws cannot be proved: still one cannot deny that,
these laws notwithstanding, countless ways were possible of distributing
the masses in space, under which the solar system might perhaps have
endured for thousands of years, but not forever. The calculations carried
out in this chapter, whose results rest solely on the arbitrary distribution
of the planetary masses which we know through observation, and
concerning which no inquiry a priori, no necessity, can be conceived at all,
prove this most plainly. They show that under a different distribution a
total transformation, and under a different ratio of the orbits perhaps an
eventual destruction of the solar system, would have resulted; but that
through the actual distribution, its eternal duration has been
provided for. Who is able to grasp these sublime truths without,
full of gratitude and wonder, adoring the infinite wisdom that
appointed the most perfect machine to everlasting duration, laid in its
first constitution the seed of immortality, and marked out for the heavenly
bodies bounds not to be transgressed, within which their great dance of
the spheres can endure forever without confusion or interruption!"