# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1863_S241
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Materialism, or the So-Called Results of Modern Natural Science. 241

...undeniable fact that man is nothing more than a combination of substances, which are regularly replaced by new ones every four weeks, and whose changeable rearrangement within this combination, during its eternal and unstoppable change and flux, produces effects which we have hitherto foolishly ascribed to a mythological being that we called the soul. We are therefore, properly speaking, scarcely four weeks old. When you were born — or rather, when that material combination arose to which you trace your existence — I did not yet exist. And you yourself have, in the course of your years, become an entirely different and new person nearly three hundred times. Do not be misled by my saying that you have experienced this. Our language has not yet been able to keep pace with the newest discoveries, and it is difficult to convey, in brief, by means of expression suited to the old darkness, the new knowledge. Four weeks ago you were still a number of atoms scattered here and there, a portion of the constituent parts that make up the air, the water, the earth, the fruits, the flesh of animals and the like, both in the vicinity and far away. I am meeting you now for the first time, and you have never known me. This explanation will suffice to excuse me if I ask you now to withdraw your presence from me, and to allow me to address a few words to these women, who, laboring under the delusion of seeing a son and a brother before them, did not hesitate to embrace, before my very eyes, a person wholly unknown to them. — The sister, who has not understood a word of this explanation, speaks in dismay of the father's cold rejection of her brother: Father, dear father! do you truly no longer know him, your son, my dear brother? Why, I recognized him in the very moment he entered. How little his features have changed. He has only grown stronger, more manly, more handsome in the time we had to do without him. — Be silent, fool! the father replies to her with grim earnestness. The resemblance which you believe you recognize between this person here and a being you claim to have known before you yourself existed, when the animal kingdom, the plant kingdom, and the mineral kingdom still held you enclosed as scattered elements, is mere appearance. Foreign substances may well enter into a combination similar to an earlier one, but it is not therefore the earlier combination itself, since every substance can stand only in its own combination with others, and neither you nor he has ever seen that earlier combination. This supposed recognition is nothing but a sad deception of the senses, and truly laughable is the delusion that there could in reality ever be a brother and sister who are not twins and under four weeks old! — Trembling and frightened half to death, his wife now throws herself, in tears, upon his breast. My dear husband! she laments, what evil dream holds your mind in its grip? Only look about you! See here your son and mine, see your faithful wife here upon your breast! Excessive joy has done you harm. Let go, oh let go of these evil thoughts, and gather yourself once more, and let us thank