# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1863_S243
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Materialism, or the So-Called Results of Modern Natural Science. 243

...false delusion, grounded in ignorance, no longer to be indulged in. We are free, my love, free from every restriction. Only our own convenience can henceforth be our lawgiver. Every other obligating bond, the great achievements in the field of natural science have stripped from us as unworthy fetters. Enjoy the freedom which the light of science has won for you too, and show yourself a contemporary worthy of the nineteenth century. — Meanwhile friends have entered, whose sorrowful looks and secret whispering betray to the adherent of the new doctrine that they pity him as a man who has lost his reason. Sighing, he cries out: O you sublime teachers of the highest light, how little is the great mass of mankind as yet able to grasp the results of your research! It would take little more, and these people here would lock me — your sober, clear-headed, consistent disciple — in irons, and keep me shut up between bare walls, like a madman. How much still remains to be done! You have thus far only laid the foundation for a natural and congenial view of world and life; when will you succeed in delivering mankind at large from the unnatural fetters of that cold and heartless dogmatism of the Christian religion, and in restoring to it the true view of the natural! You say that through your magnificent discoveries and inventions you have opened to the gaze of individuals and of peoples entirely new, comprehensive, and cosmopolitan points of view, and that through your whole tendency — hostile to every kind of belief in authority and to spiritual bondage — you have set a movement going in the world whose final results will be as surprising as they are gratifying. My own experience does indeed show them to me as surprising, but why are they not yet generally gratifying? The new movement has been set in motion, but its final results have not yet been made the common property of all; and I see that it is wisely done not yet to come forward with the full truth. That would call into question the success of our intended revolution, which must bring the day of judgment upon every foundation hitherto laid for social life in family, church, and state. For the present no other means remain to us than to secure, through the press, the widest possible circulation for the most general scientific principles of our view of world and life, so as to prepare men's minds for the final consequences, and at the same time to win, at least in the political sphere, mastery and direction over the masses. Only gradually can we overcome the enormous difficulties that stand in the way of our goal. Everywhere the spiritually free man is still confronted by gloomy prisons, in which so-called criminals languish for deeds they did not commit — deeds that can be traced back only to material combinations long since dissolved and no longer to be caught hold of by man; the debtor still trembles before his creditor and judge on account of debts which he cannot or will not pay, and ought not to pay, since it was only an altogether different being who, under the deceptive appearance of the same name, the same form, the same surround-