Reader. Certainly.
Büchner. But a beginning of matter is inconceivable. For how could matter come into existence?
Reader. By creation out of nothing.
Büchner. This is what I deny. For out of nothing nothing can arise. This is an axiom. Hence “never can an atom arise anew or disappear; it can only change its combinations.... Matter must have existed from eternity, and must last for ever” (p. 12).
Reader. I am not in the least surprised to hear that my long talk did not convince you. It is always difficult to convince a man against his will. My object, however, was not to give you a positive demonstration of the fact of creation, but only to show that the reasons which you were parading against creation amount to nothing. Of this I hope I have not failed to convince you. But now you come forward with a new argument, which indeed is very old, consisting in a pretended axiom, that out of nothing nothing can arise. Suppose, doctor, that I deny your axiom. How would you show that I deny a truth?
Büchner. “How can any one deny the axiom that out of nothing nothing can arise?” (p. 12).
Reader. You must know, doctor, that what you assume to be an old axiom is only an old error. In fact, why do you say that out of nothing nothing can arise? Simply because natural energies can do nothing without pre-existing materials. Hence your argument amounts to this. “Natural energies never make anything out of nothing; therefore out of nothing nothing can be made.” That this conclusion is a great blunder I need not prove, I presume, as logic teaches that no conclusion can be more general than its premises. Where is, then, the ground of your pretended axiom?
Nor can you reply that the natural energies are the only energies known to us, and that, if these cannot make anything out of nothing, the axiom is unexceptionably true. This would be to assume what you are bound to prove, to wit, that there is no power above the natural forces; and to assume this is what logicians call Petitio principii. On the other hand, you cannot maintain that such natural forces are the only ones we know; for you cannot limit the range of human knowledge within the narrow sphere of mere empiricism without denying human reason.
Büchner. We have no notion of supersensible forces.
Reader. You talk without reflection, doctor. If you have no such a notion, what is it, then, that compels you to admit any demonstrated [pg 641] truth? Is it attraction, heat, electricity, or any of your physical or chemical forces? No; it is the force of demonstration, it is the force of truth. This is no vain theory; I appeal to your own experience. Your intellect is obliged to yield to the force of evidence and demonstration just as inevitably as the pendulum is obliged to yield to the force of gravitation. And since a real effect requires a real cause, hence whatever thus really compels your intellect to yield must have a real power, and that evidently supersensible.