# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1863_S234
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

Suppose now that it were strictly impossible for the elements either to perish of themselves or to be destroyed and annihilated by other elements — and setting entirely aside the fact that no human being has ever come to know, nor ever will come to know, the actual nature and true essence of what the materialists call matter and atom — does it follow from this that, if something is impossible for matter, it is also impossible for the Creator? Only on the assumption that the Creator himself is matter. On that we will waste no word. The materialist now draws the conclusion: because matter cannot destroy matter, there can therefore be no God. "What cannot be annihilated could also not have been created." With this proposition he brought support to his first proof — one drawn from force, and one that collapses of its own accord — a proof for which he wished, in the present chapter, to prepare the ground and foundation. And what does the proposition say? Nothing more than: what cannot be annihilated by matter could also not have been created by matter. So we must ask him to address this proof rather to those non-existent beings who believe the world was created out of matter. To us his wisdom can only pass for the babble of a fool. Nor can we expect of our reason that, in self-denying humility, it should bow beneath the authority of a Vogt and a Czolbe. We must leave that to the servum pecus of those "educated" persons who believe they have attained the highest science when they have let themselves be led out to pasture by these gentlemen.

"With every breath," Dr. Büchner continues, "that goes forth from our mouth, we breathe out a part of the food we enjoy, of the water we drink. We transform ourselves so rapidly that one may well suppose that within a period of four weeks we are, materially, wholly different and new beings; the atoms change, only the manner of their combination remains the same. These atoms themselves, however, are in themselves unchangeable, indestructible; today in this combination, tomorrow in that, they form, through the diversity of their coming together, the innumerably different shapes in which matter presents itself to our senses, hastening on in an eternal and unstoppable change and flux. [— This so-often-repeated assertion, that all the change which occurs in nature and which we perceive consists only in the diversity of the coming-together of unchangeable particles of matter lying beside one another — merely like grains of sand in a sand-heap — and changing their place, is a veritable monster of superstition, one just as alien to the natural sciences as the proposition that two times two is three would be to mathematics. We should indeed like to see a physics and a physiology built upon such a foundation. —] At the same time, the quantity of atoms of a simple element remains, taken as a whole, unchangeably the same; not a single particle of matter can come newly into being, nor can one that has once existed vanish out of existence. The examples and proofs for this could be brought forward in