# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1863_S245
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Materialism, or the So-Called Results of Modern Natural Science. 245

...of the world and of human life — his sound instinct for what is natural led him to put into the mouth of the unfortunate soul, sighing under the influence of heartless religion and morals and burning with shame, the words that only human contrivance could produce such spiteful laws, which enviously withhold what nature grants us, what it has never denied the cow and the horse, the buck and the bird. But centuries had to pass before science brought about the glorious age in which, as Büchner aptly puts it, nothing is easier than to demonstrate scientifically that man is nothing more than a highly organized animal; that he could have come into being in no other way than as the result of a development out of the animal world nearest to him; that the soul of animals differs from the human soul not in quality but only in quantity; that man merely produces a greater quantity of animal mental activities than the animals just named. What can it profit man to set himself against facts? We did not invent the world and nature, so neither are we responsible for what they do in us. Nature has — as forces itself upon the eyes of every human individual, however haughty through the consciousness of his supposed divine destiny — clearly marked out for us our place in the animal world, to which we after all belong; let whoever wishes dispute that with his Creator, not with us, who make the matter quite easy for ourselves and simply say: so it is! explain it however you like! There can indeed be nothing higher for us to follow than nature; to resist its impulses, which rest upon eternal and unchangeable laws of nature, means to cripple one's own existence; to follow its impulses openly, like the other animals — whose natural impulses are not veiled by human unnaturalness through so-called shame, and which even the most rigorous theological fanaticism would not dare to call sin and crime — means only to wipe from our cheeks the hypocritical varnish that makes us appear other than we are. The entire animal world — whose conduct is wrongly derived from instinct, but can readily be shown instead to be an outflow of conscious mental activity, since the animal deliberates, considers, gathers experience, remembers the past, provides for the future, feels — in a mental process entirely the same as in man, lays open and clear before our eyes that cheerful and enjoying view of the world which our understanding must pronounce the only natural one; it likewise confirms, not obscurely, our scientific findings concerning the rapid transformation of animal organisms. No animal has ever embittered its joy of life through foolish grief over a supposedly neglected and wayward child, in the delusion of having failed at some point in its earlier upbringing. The artificial relations, arising only from ignorance of that scientific fact, between grown children and their parents, between brothers,