Reader. I would remark that the qualities of matter are not eternal. Of course, as long as matter continues to exist, its essential constitution must remain intact; but to say that the qualities of matter are eternal is to assume not only that matter will last for ever, but also that it has existed from all eternity. Science has no right to make this assumption, since it has no means of ascertaining its truth; for evidently eternity does not come under observation and experiment. But leaving aside this question, which we may examine later, I say that your quotation from M. Dubois does not account for the universality of your proposition.
Büchner. Hear Moleschott: “A force not united to matter, but floating freely above it, is an idle conception” (p. 1).
Reader. This is a mere assertion.
Büchner. Hear Cotta: “Nothing in the world justifies us in assuming the existence per se of forces independent of the bodies from which they proceed and upon which they act” (p. 2).
Reader. This is no proof. It is quite clear that those forces which proceed from the bodies cannot be independent of the bodies. But your proposition is that no force whatever can exist without matter; and therefore you should prove that all forces, without exception, are dependent on matter.
Büchner. First of all, we must admit that there is no matter without force. “Imagine matter without force, and the minute particles of which a body consists without that system of mutual attraction and repulsion which holds them together, and gives form and shape to the body; imagine the molecular forces of cohesion and affinity removed; what then would be the consequence? The matter must instantly break up into a shapeless nothing. We know in the physical world of no instance of any particle of matter which is not endowed with forces by means of which it plays its appointed part in some form or another, sometimes in connection with similar or with dissimilar particles. Nor are we in imagination capable of forming a conception of matter without force. In whatever way we may think of an original substance, there must [pg 442] always exist in it a system of mutual repulsion and attraction between its minutest parts, without which they would dissolve and tracelessly disappear in universal space. A thing without properties is a non-entity, neither rationally cogitable nor empirically existing in nature” (pp. 2, 3).
Reader. Very good so far. But this is no recent discovery; it is an old truth constantly taught, and much more exactly expressed, by those schoolmen whom you imagine to have been “the persecutors of science.” Thus far, then, you have only rehearsed the old doctrine. But now you have to show that, as there is no matter without force, so also there is no force without matter.
Büchner. Yes. “Force without matter is equally an idle notion. It being a law admitting of no exception that force can only be manifested in matter, it follows that force can as little possess a separate existence as matter without force” (p. 3).
Reader. Take care, doctor! You are now assuming what should be proved. You assume a law, admitting of no exception, that force can only be manifested in matter.
Büchner. The law is known. “Imagine an electricity, a magnetism, without the iron or such bodies as exhibit these phenomena, and without the particles of matter, the mutual relation of which is just the cause of these phenomena; nothing would then remain but a confused idea, an empty abstraction, to which we have given a name in order to form a better conception. If the material particles capable of an electric condition had never existed, there would have been no electricity, and we should never have been able by mere attraction to acquire the least knowledge or conception of electricity. Indeed, we may say electricity would never have existed without these particles. All the so-called imponderables, such as light, heat, electricity, magnetism, etc., are neither more nor less than changes in the aggregate state of matter—changes which, almost like contagion, are transmitted from body to body. Heat is a separation, cold an approximation, of the material atoms. Light and sound are vibrating, undulating bodies. Electrical and magnetic phenomena, says Czolbe, arise, as experience shows, like light and heat from the reciprocal relation of molecules and atoms” (pp. 3, 4).