# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1863_S233
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Materialism, or the So-Called Results of Modern Natural Science. 233

without wishing to diminish it in any way. This very love of science alone must call upon us to separate, from what chemistry has gained as correct and unquestionable experience, whatever has been mixed into the genuine result as a mere admixture of an unscientific, materialistic mind. Such, here, is the proposition that the quantity and quality of the elements remains unalterable for all time, that matter is imperishable, eternal, never destructible, that an element can never be annihilated. Of this the chemist knows nothing. To offer even half of this proposition as a result of his science, the chemist would have had to hold, from the beginning of the world, or rather from eternity, down to this very moment, not only the earth but the whole immeasurable universe upon his scale, in order to learn that throughout this whole time it had not become lighter by so much as the weight of an "infinitely small particle of matter"!! What then is it that chemistry has actually found in this respect? Nothing more than that not one of the fifty-odd elements of which the parts of the earth so far accessible to it are supposed to consist has, in the experiments conducted so far, either wholly disappeared of itself or been annihilated as to any of their number. Does the chemist know from experience that what has not happened so far can, under no condition, ever become possible? Far from it. Does he know from his experience what happens everywhere that nature is not confined in his apparatus and called to account for its doings? That even in the vast, immeasurable reaches of the heavens no element is to be found that, under any condition, could do what the materialist asserts to be impossible — solely because nothing similar has so far occurred in any chemical retort? If, then, as is undeniable, the chemist cannot gain that proposition from experience, by what road does he propose to arrive at it? That the eternal, indestructible nature of the elements alone explains their non-disappearance hitherto in the retort is evidently only a hypothesis. If he wishes to gain a sure, unquestionable conviction on the matter, that can happen only by the road of metaphysical speculation, in that he undertakes an inquiry into being, and into whether it is conceivable that one substance could rob another of existence. But that is not chemistry, but metaphysics. A writer, then, who has not yet grasped the distinction between empirical science and speculation, between chemistry and metaphysics, ought indeed not to venture to appear as a teacher in the field of the natural sciences. — What has been said here of the imperishability of matter holds in still higher degree of its so-called unchangeableness. In this regard the chemical experiments have, e.g., yielded the result that wines and ethereal oils, spoiled by distillation, are not restored by the pouring-together of what had been separated — which points clearly to a change in the substances.