# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1863_S240
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

if, as the materialists maintain, there is no soul at all — if what is called the soul is only either certain secretions of matter from the brain, or variable effects of the combination of matter in this organ — then this so-called soul is so interwoven and included in the complete exchange of the substances forming a man, an exchange occurring every four weeks, that man, in body and soul, becomes in every eight and twenty days a wholly different and new being. The soul then changes along with the matter, indeed properly speaking with every change of material action. If, then, there is a moral responsibility for disposition and deed, it rests solely upon the substances which, in the space of four weeks, have completely and secretly withdrawn and been lost into the air, into the water, into the elements of mother earth, and, as it were scornfully, leave the consequences of those deeds as a legacy to the strange substances — wholly innocent of those deeds — that generate an entirely new soul. If the advocates of the new doctrine still possess a natural sense of justice, they must, in the name of the commonest morality, warn men against such deception by the secretly escaping substances, and demand a complete overthrow of all the moral relations of mankind, so that it should no longer happen — as it still commonly does in their view at present — that punishment and merit fall upon the guiltless and the unworthy. What extent such an overthrow of the foundations of the family and of society generally would come to assume, we will now attempt to show by a few indications, by way of an example.

A happy family is just now thrown into great agitation by a joyfully surprising event. The eldest son of the house, having happily returned from a journey of several years, enters suddenly and unexpectedly into the family circle. Everyone hastens to embrace him. The father alone remains a cold and silent spectator of this moving scene. He is a materialist such as so-called modern science can only wish for — a researcher who "may not shrink squeamishly from the consequences, as simple as they are unavoidable, of an unprejudiced, empirico-philosophical view of nature, but who really does concede the truth in all its parts." The son throws himself into his arms as well, but is rebuffed, however politely, with such coldness that he cries out in alarm: Father! Do you not know me any more? Or has some calamity, wholly unknown to me, been permitted to tear your fatherly love from me? — Foolish stranger! — begins the father — you call me your father, and thereby show how deeply you must still be caught up in that superstition and dark deception which the science of our day has at last uncovered, in that it has given to the spirit the light of truth, penetrating and dispelling every mist of appearance and ignorance. I forgive your presumption in intruding here without introduction or announcement, for I know the strength of that deception, in which I myself was too long entangled. Learn, then: it is now a scientifically established, and no longer to be