# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1863_S209
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Materialism, or the So-Called Results of Modern Natural Science. 209

To all this one might object that no proof has yet been given that the world could have been formed by divine art alone. However great the probability may turn out to be that the world is not a work of chance or of natural necessity but of intention, it still cannot be denied that its formation was possible even without divine art, since even the greatest probability is still not knowledge, and no one can demonstrate the impossibility of its origin by chance. Against this objection we ask the reader to consider the following words of a precise thinker. Herbart says in his Metaphysik, vol. I, p. 106: "Even the beginner can guard himself against the Kantian confusion" — namely, that only that can be held to have arisen from intention which is impossible according to merely mechanical laws — "if he gives himself an account of the manner in which he understands the purposefulness of human actions, and of what follows from this for him in daily life. He never begins by regarding a work of human art as something impossible according to merely mechanical laws, but rather as something that was not to be expected in the ordinary course of things if human beings had not made it. The individual clods of earth on a freshly ploughed field may well lie of themselves just as one finds them, and it cannot be shown why they should not lie otherwise. But that all these clods should at once lie half crumbled and heaped in rows, without having been touched by the plough, is in the highest degree improbable; and this improbability brings with it the belief in human labor. A similar belief is the foundation of all society among human beings. No proof teaches us to interpret human speech as human thought. We put our own thoughts into the sounds of the words we hear, and we believe without further ado that these same thoughts contain the origin as well as the intention of the speaking. It would nevertheless be possible for just such sounds to become audible even without any preceding thinking and willing. Or who thinks of proving the impossibility of that? Certainly no one! Whoever has some notion of the nature of what we call our human knowledge knows that a great probability is everywhere stronger and more useful than strict knowledge itself. For doubts can be raised against every piece of knowledge, doubts which nevertheless go quite unheeded in the midst of life. And the strictest demonstration, as soon as it is too long to be conveniently taken in at a single glance, gives us only probability, because we may very easily suspect ourselves of having let an error slip in somewhere in the chain of inferences."

The facts, then, which the materialist adduces to found his groundless assertions contain, as we have seen, an overwhelming refutation of the whole materialistic system and a splendid vindication of belief in a Creator and Ruler