So it appears, then, that also this conflict serves only to add force to the ancient principle that scientific research and the presentation of scientific truth is not to be bound by any limitations or by any considerations of expediency, and must find its sole and all sufficient justification in itself alone. This principle hereby achieved a new lustre and gained the full authentication of the crown.
Even the existence of God was not shielded from the discussion of science. Science was allowed, as it is still allowed, to put forth its proofs against his existence. The provisions of the new penal code bear only upon blasphemous utterances, such revilings of God as may offend those who believe otherwise, not upon the denial of his existence.
For many decades before the days of the Constitution the unquestioned liberty of science on Prussian ground had served the antagonists of Prussia as their supreme recourse, their chief boast and proudest ornament. You will remember the extraordinary sensation created by the case of Bruno Bauer, the Privat Docent on the theological faculty at Bonn, whom it was attempted to deprive of his licentia docendi[51] at the ominous instance of the absolutist-pietistical Eichhorn ministry, because of his peculiar doctrine concerning the gospel. This was the first case during the present century in which an assault has been attempted upon the freedom of scientific teaching, and even this was an infinitely less heinous one than the present. The faculties of the university were deeply stirred, and for months together official pronunciamentos swarmed about the town; men of the highest standing, such as Marheinecke and others, declared that protestantism and enlightenment were threatened in their very foundations in case such usurpation, hitherto unheard of in Prussia, were allowed to take its course. And even such expressions of opinion as reached a conclusion subservient to the ministerial view based their conclusion on the ground that the case in question concerned a licentia docendi in the theological faculty, with the fundamental principles of which Bauer's doctrines were incompatible. They took care expressly to declare that had the question concerned a licentia docendi in any one of the nontheological faculties, in a philosophical faculty, e.g., the decision must necessarily have been reversed. No one, not even Eichhorn himself, harbored the conceit that this doctrine and its teaching was to be dealt with by the criminal court. A teacher who spread abroad scientific teachings subversive of theological doctrines was deprived of the opportunity to proclaim his teaching from a theological chair; but to call in the jailer to suppress him—to that depth of subservience to absolutism had no one at that time descended. Alas, that Eichhorn, the much berated, could not have lived to see this day! With what admiration and with what gratification would he have looked upon his "constitutional" successors!
Even in the days of Eichhorn's pietistical absolutism, with its ecclesia militans of obscurantism, there survived so much of a sense of decency regarding the ancient traditions as to exempt the liberty of scientific teaching from the indignity of that preventive censure which in those days rendered repressive legislation superfluous. In their search for some tenable and tangible criterion of the scientific character of any publication, the men of that time, it is true, hit upon a somewhat absurd one in making the test a test of bulk—books of more than twenty forms were exempt from censure. But however awkward the outcome, the aim of the provision is not to be denied.
These ancient traditions, with more than five hundred years of prescriptive standing; this principle which prevailed by usage and acceptance among all modern peoples long before it was embodied in legal form; this primordial deliverance of the spiritual life of the Germanic nations is the substantial fact which our modern society has now finally embodied in Article 20 of the Constitution and so has constituted a norm for the guidance of all later law-givers, in other words: "Science and its teaching is free."
It is free without qualification, without limits, without bolts and bars. Under established law everything has its limitations,—every power, every function, every vested authority. The only thing which remains without bounds or constituted limitation, whose privilege it is to over-spread and to overlie all established facts, in such boundless and unhindered freedom as the sun and the air, is the irradiating force of theoretical research.
Scientific theory must be free even to the length of license. For, even if we could speak of a license in science and its teaching,—which, by the way, is most seriously to be questioned,—this is by all means a point at which an attempt to guard against abuse in one case would be liable in a million instances to put a check upon the blessings of rightful use. If any given measures of state, or any given class institutions, were shielded from scientific discussion, so that science might not teach that the arrangements in question are inadequate or detrimental, iniquitous or destructive,—under these circumstances, what genius could there be of such comprehensive reach, so far overtopping the spiritual level of all his contemporaries and all succeeding generations, as even to surmise the total extent of the loss which would thereby be sustained? What fruitful discoveries and developments, what growth of spiritual power and insight would be stifled in the germ by one such rigid interdict upon abuse; and what violent convulsions and what decay might not come upon the State in consequence of it?
The question is also fairly to be asked: what is legitimate use and what is abuse of science? Where lies the line between them, and who determines it? This discretion would have to lie, not with a court of law, but with a court made up of the flower of scientific talent of the time, in all departments and branches of science.
However enlightened your honorable body may be—and indeed the more enlightened the more unavoidably—this proposition must appeal to you as beyond question. What am I saying? The flower of the scientific talent of the time? No; that would not answer. The scientific genius of all subsequent time would have to be included; for how often does history show us the pioneers of science in sheer contradiction with the accepted body of scientific knowledge of their own time! It may take fifty, and it may often take a hundred years of discussion in scientific matters to settle the question as to what is true and legitimate and what is abuse.
In point of fact, there has hitherto been not an attempt, since the adoption of the constitution, to bring an indictment against any given scientific teaching.