# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1863_S244
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

-ings, might have done the deed. Still men demand the keeping of oaths, of promises, of covenants, of treaties and contracts in the dealings of individuals and of peoples, in the dark delusion that the free spirit can be bound by something entered into a few days before — even if it were entered into as an eternal obligation. Still deeds are branded as crimes, not only by the cold and heartless Christian religion, but even by the widely read works of the classical heathen world — deeds which, as science has established as an undeniable fact, are, in the sense given to them, purely impossible. Why, even Ovid, who passes for frivolous, marks a deed he himself sang of as something hideous, one from which his song bids daughters and parents flee and, should that not avail, at least entreats them not to believe it — and, should they believe it after all, at least urges them to believe also in the deed's punishment; he himself wishes good fortune to the land that lies far from the regions which produced so dreadful an abomination; he goes on, in a long series of verses, telling how it was not Cupid's arrow but the serpent-breath of the Furies alone that could have driven her to such an outrage, while at the same time her guilty conscience made her behold those dreadful sisters, so that, through their terrifying shape — shaggy with hideous snakes — storming with raging torches against the face and eyes of the supposed criminal, they might warn her off from such a sin; how she then tries to hang herself by her own girdle, preferring to meet death rather than the fulfillment of her frenzied desires; how, at the horrifying discovery of these desires, a shudder ran through the icy limbs of the nurse, and the bleached gray of her stiffened hair stood bristling on her scalp; how, when the unhappy girl, with trembling knees, drained of color and blood in her horror, sets out to commit her dreadful deed, the moon fled from the sky, black clouds veiled the stars, and the night was without its light — and what was it? — Myrrha had, in love, sought her father's bed! What could have been more innocent? It is now an undeniable fact that such a union has as little of the criminal about it as any that Christian or heathen customs have ever consecrated in the name of their gods. For a marital union between father and daughter is, in every case, a natural-scientific impossibility, and neither custom nor law may, in this regard, impose restrictions upon the urge of nature, since these have their origin solely in ignorance and error. But such fearful shapes of superstition dragged themselves on from one age to the next, until at last, driven out by the final, gratifying, cheerful, and liberating results of modern science, they will no longer hinder the building of the state and of society upon the foundation now laid, and mankind's true goal — to order life as profitably and enjoyably as possible, both for the individual and for the whole — will be attained. And yet Ovid had already seen the truth of the matter. His cheerful and kindly conception of the