# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1863_S236
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

become. Be it wherever it will, everywhere it will remain the same being; out of every combination, however heterogeneous, it will emerge again, upon that combination's dissolution, as the same atom that entered it. But never, ever, can an atom newly come into being or vanish out of existence; it can do nothing but change its combinations. For these reasons matter is immortal, and for this reason it is, as already shown earlier, impossible that the world should be a thing that came into being. How could something have been created that cannot be annihilated!? Matter must have been eternal, must be eternal, and must remain eternal. ""Matter is eternal; only its forms change."" (Rossmässler.) It is a phrase heard and repeated to the point of weariness, that of the ""mortal body"" and the ""immortal spirit."" A somewhat closer consideration will perhaps allow this proposition to be reversed with more truth. The body, in its individual form, is indeed mortal, but not in its constituent parts. Not only in death, but also in life, it transforms itself, as we have seen, without ceasing; but in a higher sense it is immortal, since not the smallest particle of it can be annihilated. On the other hand, we see that which we call spirit vanish with the cessation of the individual material composition, and it must appear to an unprejudiced understanding as though this peculiar interworking of many force-endowed particles of matter had produced an effect that must cease along with its cause. [— Here, for a change, we again have an "interworking of force-endowed particles of matter, which produce an effect." Since this effect cannot hover in a vacuum, but must adhere to some actual being, and since the only actual beings are the unchangeable atoms, this effect, according to materialistic doctrine, can consist only in the altered position of the atoms. This altered position, then, is what the materialist here calls spirit. But in the first chapter it had been asserted that the changes perceptible to the senses in matter — that is, the changes of position of the particles of matter — are not the effect of forces, but are themselves the forces! —] ""If we are not annihilated by death,"" says Fechner, ""we nevertheless cannot save, in death, our present mode of existence. We shall visibly return again to the earth from which we were taken. But while we change, the earth endures and continues to develop further and further; it is an immortal being, and all the heavenly bodies are so along with it."""

Hereupon the author finally adduces a few further testimonies, "that earlier philosophers too possessed a knowledge of this momentous truth, even if more in an unclear and intuitive manner than in one scientifically and surely recognized." For "the proof of it," he says, "could first be furnished to us by our scales and retorts," so that "today the immortality of matter is a scientifically established and no-longer-deniable fact." He first cites the notorious Anabaptist Sebastian Franck, that "wicked, blasphemous mouth, which can do nothing but blaspheme and