# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1863_S238
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

a few indications, to draw out still further some of those unavoidable consequences from which he has, throughout his whole work, still squeamishly shrunk. That a metabolism takes place in the human body, as in every organism — since none can continue to exist while retaining the same elements, but each must take in nourishment in order to replace what has been consumed — is no new doctrine. That a metabolism to a considerable degree takes place also in the healthy organism, and that upon it rests not only nutrition but also the so-called breadth of health, has been made highly probable by recent research. But that all parts of the body are so affected by it that within a period of four weeks we become, materially, wholly different and new beings, is an assertion resting on nothing. Let us hear on this subject a physiologist who, as a man of the profession, is not guilty of the ridiculous exaggerations of materialist chatterers. Dr. R. H. Lotze, in his work (General Pathology and Therapy as Mechanical Natural Sciences, 2nd ed., p. 441), says: "Into the blood come the normal constituents of nutrition; into it, too, are led back the masses hastening toward decomposition and excretion, in order to be conveyed into the secreting capillary vessel-networks. This process of nutrition and purification in the individual parts of the body, and of the blood as a whole, is liable to disturbance at many points; unfortunately, however, we know neither the normal nor the pathological behavior even with tolerable accuracy; nowhere are there found so many fabrications and poor fancies as in this part of pathology, which has nevertheless been made, as one of the most important, the foundation of many therapeutic procedures . . . . Since here, given the complete lack of attested detail, the only concern is to give a general survey of the relations, we recall the views we set forth earlier concerning the importance and significance of metabolism, from which follows the necessity of assimilation as well as of replacement, and of excretion and secretion. Changeableness and continual change of the masses is an indispensable condition for every mechanism which has within itself such a principle of principle-less motions as the organism possesses in the soul, and which must nevertheless maintain itself in its natural, primitive state against all these accidentally excited changes. It follows from this that there are two kinds of origin for the masses of decomposition; they are produced either through the service of the parts of the body, which are used up and rendered useless by their function, or they arise even without any use, and hence without wear, as products of the spontaneous transformation to which the substances of the body must be subject. As for the first mode of origin, this necessity for metabolism through function is, in essence, confined to the sensory and