Gentlemen, since 1848—since 1830—we have here in Prussia had many a sore and heavy burden to bear, and our shoulders are lame and tired with the bearing of them. But even under the Manteuffel-Westphalen administration, and until today, we have been spared this one indignity, of being called upon to see a scientific doctrine cited before the court.
The keenest attacks, attacks which, taken by themselves, might easily have been subject to criminal prosecution, have suffered no prosecution in any case where they have been embodied in a scientific work and when promulgated in the form of a scientific doctrine.
I am myself in a position to testify on this point. It is not quite two years since I published a work in which, I believe, I have succeeded in contributing something to the advancement of your own science, Gentlemen,—the science on which the administration of justice is based. The work of which I speak is my "System of Acquired Rights." (System der erworbenen Rechte.) In this work I take occasion to say (Vol. I., p. 238): "Science, whose first duty is the most searching inquiry and concise thinking, can on this account in no way deprive itself of the right to formulate its conceptions with all the definiteness and concision which the clearness of these conceptions itself requires." And proceeding on this ground I go on, in the further discussion, to show that the agrarian legislation of Prussia subsequent to 1850 is nothing else—to quote my own words literally—than a robbery of the poor for the benefit of the wealthy landed aristocracy, illegal and perpetrated in violation of the perpetrators' own sense of equity.
How easy would it not have been, if the expressions had occurred elsewhere than in a scientific treatise, to find that they embodied overt contempt of the institutions of the State, and incitement to hatred and disregard of the regulations of the government. But they occurred in a scientific treatise—they were the outcome of a painstaking scientific inquiry,—therefore they passed without indictment.
But that was two years ago.
In return for the accusation which has been brought against me, I, in my turn, retort with the accusation that my accusers have this day brought upon Prussia the disgrace that now for the first time since the State came into existence scientific teaching is prosecuted before a criminal court. For what can the public prosecutor say to my accusation, since he concedes the substance of my claims, since he is compelled to acknowledge that science and its teaching is free, and therefore free from all penal restraint? Will he contend, perhaps, that I do not represent science? Or will he, possibly, deny that the work with which this indictment is concerned is a scientific work? The prosecutor seems to feel himself hampered by the fact that he has here to do with a scientific production, for he begins his indictment with the sentence: "While the accused has assumed an appearance of scientific inquiry, his discussion at all points is of a practical bearing." The appearance of scientific inquiry? And why is it the appearance only? I call upon the prosecutor to show why only the appearance of scientific inquiry is to be imputed to this scientific publication. I believe that in a question as to what is scientific and what not, I am more competent to speak than the public prosecutor.
In various and difficult fields of science I have published voluminous works; I have spared no pains and no midnight vigils in the endeavor to widen the scope of science itself, and, I believe, I can in this matter say with Horace: Militavi non sine gloria.[52] But I declare to you: Never, not in the most voluminous of my works, have I written a line that was more carefully thought out in strict conformity to scientific truth than this production is from its first page to its last. And I assert further that not only is this brochure a scientific work, as so many another may be that presents in combination results already known, but that it is in many respects a scientific achievement, a development of new scientific conceptions.
What is the criterion by which the scientific standing of a book is to be judged? None else, of course, than its contents.
I beg you, therefore, to take a look at the contents of this pamphlet. Its content is nothing else than a philosophy of history, condensed in the compass of forty-four pages, beginning with the Middle Ages and coming down to the present. It is a development of that objective unfolding of rational thought which has lain at the root of European history for more than a thousand years past; it is an exposition of that inner soul of things resident in the process of history that manifests itself in the apparently opaque, empirical sequence of events and which has produced this historical sequence out of its own moving, creative force. It is, in spite of the brief compass of the pamphlet, the strictly developed proof that history is nothing else than the self-accomplishing, by inner necessity increasingly progressive unfolding of reason and of freedom, achieving itself under the mask of apparently mere external and material relations.
In the brief compass of this pamphlet, I pass three great periods of the world's history in review before the reader; and for each one I point out that it proceeds on a single comprehensive idea, which controls all the various, apparently unrelated, fields of development and all the different and widely-scattered phenomena that fall within the period in question; and I show that each of these periods is but the necessary forerunner and preparation for the succeeding period, and that each succeeding period is the peculiar and imminently necessary continuation, the consequence and unavoidable consummation of the preceding period, and that these together, consequently, constitute a comprehensive and logically inseparable whole.