Chapter XVIII: Part 18

These instances, which might be multiplied at will, may suffice to show how unqualified was the freedom of science even in early days, constrained by no punitive limitation at the hands of pope or king; for, be it remembered, in the Middle Ages, science had, as I have before remarked, only a corporate existence in its bearers, the universities. So that the view for which I speak has practically been accepted as much as five hundred years back, even in Catholic times and among Latin peoples.

But now comes Protestantism and creates its political structure, which it erects on precisely this broad principle of free thought and free research. This principle has since that epoch been the foundation upon which our entire political life has rested. A protestant State has no other claim to existence than precisely this--cannot possibly exist on other ground. When has there, since that time, been talk of a penal prosecution in Prussia on account of a scientific doctrine?

Christian Wolf, at Halle, popularized the Leibnizian philosophy, and it was then brought to the notice of the soldier-king, Frederick William I., that, according to Wolf's teaching of preëstablished harmony, deserting soldiers did not desert by their own free will but by force of this peculiar divine arrangement of a preëstablished harmony;[50] wherefore this doctrine, being spread abroad among the military, could not but be very detrimental to the maintenance of military discipline. It is true, this soldier-king, whose regiments were his State, was incensed at all this in the highest degree, and that he forthwith, in November, 1723, issued an order-in-council against Wolf, ordering him on penalty of the halter, to leave Prussian ground within twice twenty-four hours--and Wolf was obliged to flee. But, inasmuch as the king's _lettres de cachet_ in that time permitted no appeal, they are also passed over in history as being devoid of interest or historic significance. It may be added that the soldier-king had simply perpetrated a gratuitous outrage, and had not set the claims of law and right aside. He threatened to hang Wolf, and this threat he could have carried out with the help of his soldiers. Even brute force is not devoid of dignity when it acts openly and above-board. He did not insult his courts by asking them to condemn scientific teaching. It did not occur to him to disguise his act of violence under the forms of law.

Moreover, no sooner had Frederick the Great ascended the throne, 31st of May, 1740, than he, six days later, 6th of June, 1740, sent a note to the Councillor of the Consistory, Reinbeck, directing the recall of Wolf. Even Frederick William I. had repented of his violence against Wolf and had in vain, in the most honorable terms, addressed letters of recall to him. But Frederick the Great, while he too had use for soldiers, was no soldier-king, but a statesman. The note to Reinbeck runs: "You are requested to use your best endeavor with respect to this Wolf, who is a person that seeks and loves the truth, who is to be held in high honor among all men, and I believe you will have achieved a veritable conquest in the realm of truth if you persuade Wolf to return to us."

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.

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.

First comes the period of feudalism. I here show that feudalism, in all its variations, rests on the one principle of control of landed property, and I also show how at that time, owing to the fact that society's productive work to a preponderating extent consisted in agriculture, landed property necessarily was the controlling factor, that is to say, the feature conditioning all political and social power and standing.

And I beg you, Gentlemen, to take note with what a strict scientific objectivity of treatment, how free from all propagandist bias, I proceed with the discussion. If there is any one datum which lends itself to the purposes of that propagandist bias which the public prosecutor claims to find in this pamphlet--namely the incitement of the indigent classes to hatred of the wealthy--it is the peasant wars. If there is any one fact which has hitherto been accepted, in scientific and in popular opinion alike, and more particularly among the unpropertied classes, with, the fondest remembrance, as a national movement iniquitously put down by the strong hand of violence, it is the peasant wars.

Now, unmoved by this predilection and this shimmer of sentiment, with which the science and the popular sense have united in investing the peasant wars, I go on to divest these wars of this deceptive appearance and show them up in their true light,--that they were at bottom a reactionary movement, which, fortunately for the cause of liberty, was of necessity doomed to failure.

Further: If there exists in Germany an institution which, as a question of our own times, I abominate with all my heart as the source of our national decay, our shame and our impotence, it is the institution of the territorial State.

Now, the pamphlet in question is so strictly scientific and objective in its method, so far removed from all personal bias, that I therein go on to show that the institution of the territorial State was, in its time, historically a legitimate and revolutionary feature; that it was an ideal advance, in that it embodied and developed the concept of a State independent of relations of ownership; whereas the peasant wars sought to place the State, and all political power and standing, on the basis of property.

I then, further, go on to show how the period of feudalism is succeeded by a second world-historic period. I show how, while the peasant wars were revolutionary only in their own delusion, there begins almost simultaneously with them a real revolution, namely, that accumulation of capitalistic wealth which arose through the development of industry. This wrought a thoroughgoing change in the whole situation,--a change which reached its final act, achieved its legal acceptance, in the French Revolution of 1789, but which had in point of fact for three hundred years been imperceptibly advancing toward its consummation.

I show in detail, which I need not here expound or recapitulate, what are the economic factors that were destined to push landed property into the remotest back-ground and leave it relatively powerless, by making the new industrial activity the great lever and the bearer of modern social wealth. All this took place by force of the new industrial activity the great lever and the bearer of methods which they brought in.

I show how this capitalized wealth, which has come forward as an outcome of this industrial development and has grown to be the dominant factor in this second period, must in its turn attain the position of prerogative as the recognized qualification of political competence, as the condition of a voice in the councils and policy of the State; just as was at an earlier time the case with landed property in relation to the public law of feudalism. I show how, directly and indirectly in the control of opinion, in the requirement of bonds and stamp duties, in the public press, in the growth of individual taxation, etc., capitalized wealth, as a basis of participation in public affairs, must work out its inherent tendency with the same thoroughness and the same historical necessity as landed property had done in its time.

And this second period, which has completed its three hundred and fifty years, as I further go on to show, is now essentially concluded. With the French Revolution of 1848 comes the dawning of a new, a third historical period. By its proclamation of universal and equal suffrage, regardless of property qualifications, this third period assigns to each and every one an equal share in the sovereignty, in the guidance of public affairs and public policy. And so it installs free labor as the dominating principle of social life, conditioned by neither the possession of land nor of capital.

I then develop the difference in point of ethical principles between the _bourgeoisie_ and the laboring class, as well as the resulting difference in the political ideals of the two classes. The aristocratic principle assigned the individual his status on the basis of descent and social rank, whereas the principal for which the _bourgeoisie_ stands contends that all such legal restriction is iniquitous, and that the individual must be counted simply as such, with no prerogative beyond guaranteeing him the unhindered opportunity to make the most of his capacities as an individual. Now, I claim, if we all were by native gift equally wealthy, equally capable, equally well educated, then this principle of equal opportunity would be adequate to the purpose. But since such equality does not prevail, and indeed cannot come to pass, and since we do not come into the world simply as undifferentiated individuals, but endowed in varying degree with wealth and capacities, which in turn result in differences of education; therefore, this principle is not an adequate principle. For, if under these actual circumstances, nothing were guaranteed beyond the unhindered opportunity of the individual to make the most of himself, the consequence must be an exploitation of the weaker by the stronger. The principle for which the working classes stand is this, that free opportunity alone will not suffice, but that to this, for the purposes of any morally defensible organization of society, there must be added the further principle of a solidarity of interests, a community and mutuality in development.

From this difference between the two classes, in point of ethical principle, follows, as a matter of course, the difference in political ideals.

The _bourgeoisie_ has elaborated the principle that the end of the State is to protect the personal liberty of the individual and his property. This is the doctrine put forth by the scientific spokesmen of the _bourgeoisie_. This is the doctrine of its political leaders, of liberalism. But this theory is in a high degree inadequate, unscientific, and at variance with the essential nature of the State.

The course of history is a struggle against nature, against need, ignorance and impotence, and, therefore, against bondage of every kind in which we were held under the state of nature at the beginning of history. The progressive overcoming of this impotence,--this is the evolution of liberty, whereof history is an account. In this struggle we should never have made one step in advance, and we should never take a further step, if we had gone into the struggle singly, each for himself.

Now the State is precisely this contemplated unity and coöperation of individuals in a moral whole, whose function it is to carry on this struggle, a combination which multiplies a million fold the force of all the individuals comprised in it, which heightens a million fold the powers which each individual singly would be able to exert.

The end of the State, therefore, is not simply to secure to each individual that personal freedom and that property with which the bourgeois principle assumes that the individual enters the state organization at the outset, but which in point of fact are first afforded him in and by the State. On the contrary, the end of the State can be no other than to accomplish that which, in the nature of things, is and always has been the function of the State,--in set terms: by combining individuals into a state organization to enable them to achieve such ends and to attain such a level of existence as they could not achieve as isolated individuals.

The ultimate and intrinsic end of the State, therefore, is to further the positive unfolding, the progressive development of human life. In other words, its function is to work out in actual achievement the true end of man; that is to say, the full degree of culture of which human nature is capable. It is the education and evolution of mankind into freedom.

As a matter of fact, even the older culture, which has become the inestimable foundation of the Germanic genius, makes for such a conception of the State. I may cite the words of the great leader of our science, August Böckh: "The concept of the State must," according to him, "necessarily be so broadened as to make the State the contrivance whereby all human virtue is to be realized to the full."

But this fully developed conception of the State is, above all and essentially, a conception that is in a peculiar sense to be ascribed to the working classes. Others may conceive this conception of the State by force of insight and education, but to the working classes it is, by virtue of the helpless condition of their numbers, given as a matter of instinct; it is forced home upon them by material and economic facts.

Their economic situation necessarily breeds in these classes an instinctive sense that the function of the State is and must be that of helping the individual, through the combined efforts of all, to reach a development such as the individual in isolation is incapable of attaining.

In point of fact, however, this ethical conception of the State does not set up any concept that has not already previously been the real motor principle in the State. On the contrary, it is plain from what has already been said, that this, in an unconscious way, has been the essential nature of the State from the beginning. This essential character of the State has always in some measure asserted itself through the logical constraint of the course of events, even when such an aim has been absent from the conscious purposes of the State, even when opposed to the will of those in whose hands the power of control had rested.

In setting up this conception of the working classes as the dominant concept of the State, therefore, we do nothing more than articularly formulate what has all along, but obscurely, been the organic nature of the State, and bring it into the foreground as the consciously avowed end of society.

Herein lies the comprehensive unity and continuity of all human development, that nothing drops into the course of development from the outside. It is only that that is brought clearly into consciousness, and worked out on the ground of free choice, which has in substance all along constituted the obscurely and unconsciously effective organic nature of things.

With the French Revolution of 1848 this clearer consciousness has made its entry upon the scene and has been proclaimed. In the first place, this outcome was symbolically represented in that a workman was made a member of the provisional government; and, further, there was proclaimed universal, equal and direct suffrage, which is in point of method the means whereby this conception of the State is to be realized. February, 1848, therefore, marks the dawning of the historical period in which the ethical principle of the working classes is consciously accepted as the guiding principle of society.

We have reason to congratulate ourselves upon living in an epoch consecrated to the achievement of this exalted end. But, above all, it is to be said, since it is the destined course of this historical period to make their conception the guiding principle of society, it behooves the working classes to conduct themselves with all moral earnestness, sobriety and studious deliberation.

Such, expressed in the briefest terms, is the content and the course of argument of the disquisition in question.

What I have sought to accomplish in that argument is nothing else than to explain to my auditors the intrinsic philosophical content of the historical development, to initiate them into this most difficult of all the sciences, to bring home to them the fact that history is a logical whole which unfolds step by step under the guidance of inexorable laws.

One who gives himself up to work of this kind is entitled to address your public prosecutor in the words of Archimedes, when, at the sacking of Syracuse, he was set upon, sword in hand, by the savage soldiery while drawing and studying his mathematical figures in the sand: "_Noli turbare circulos meos_."[53]

To enable me to write this pamphlet, five different sciences, and more than that, have had to be brought into coöperation and had to be mastered: History in the narrower sense of the term, Jurisprudence and the History of Law, Political Economy, Statistics, Finance, and, last and most difficult of the sciences, the science of thought, or Philosophy.

What a paragon of scientific erudition must the public prosecutor be, in whose eyes all this is not sufficient to lend a publication the attribute of scientific quality.

But the indictment itself, when it is more closely examined, is seen to assign the ground on which this work is held to lack the requisite scientific character. The indictment says: "While the defendant, Lassalle, has been at pains to give himself the appearance of scientific method in this address, still the address is after all of a thoroughly practical bearing."

So it appears, then, that, according to the public prosecutor, the address is not scientific because it is claimed to have a practical bearing. The test of scientific adequacy, according to the public prosecutor, is the absence of practical bearing. I may fairly be permitted to ask the public prosecutor--and it is a Schelling whose signature this indictment bears--where he has learned all this. From his father? Assuredly not. Schelling the elder assigns philosophy no less serious a task than that of transforming the entire cultural epoch. "It is conceived to be too much," says he in formulating an anticipated objection, "to expect that philosophy shall rehabilitate the times." To this his answer is: "But when _I_ claim to see in philosophy a means whereby to remedy the confusion of the times, I have, of course, in mind not an impotent philosophy, not simply a product of workman-like dexterity, but a forceful philosophy which can face the facts of life, philosophy which, far from feeling itself impotent before the stupendous realities of life, far from confining itself to the dreary business of simple negation and destruction, draws its force from reality and, therefore, reaches effective and enduring results."

The public prosecutor, with his brand-new and highly extraordinary discovery, will scarcely find much comfort with the other men of the science.

In his Address to the German People, Fichte tells us: "What, then, is the bearing of our endeavors even in the most recondite of the sciences? Grant that the proximate end of these endeavors is that of propagating these sciences from generation to generation, and so conserving them; but why are they to be conserved? Manifestly only in order that they in the fulness of time shall serve to shape human life and the entire scheme of human institutions. This is the ulterior end. Remotely, therefore, even though it may be in distant ages, every endeavor of science serves to advance the ends of the State."

Now, Your Honor and Gentlemen of the Court, if I were to spend further speech in the refutation of this discovery of the public prosecutor--that impracticability is the test of science--I should be insulting your intelligence.

In the pamphlet in question my aim was the thoroughly practical one of bringing my readers to a comprehension of the times in which they live, and thereby permanently to affect their conduct throughout the course of their life and in whatever direction their activity may lie.

Now, then, what characteristic of scientific work is it which the public prosecutor finds wanting in all this? Is it, perhaps, that it falls short in respect of bulk? Is it the circumstance that this work is only a pamphlet of less than fifty pages, instead of comprising three folio volumes? But when was it decided that the bulk of a work, instead of its contents, is to be accepted as a test of its scientific character? Is the public prosecutor prepared, for instance, to deny that the papers presented by the members of the Royal Academy at their sessions are scientific productions? But nearly all of these are shorter than this of mine.

During the past year, as speaker for the Philosophical Society at the celebration of Fichte's birthday, it was my fortune to present an address in which I dealt intimately with the history of German metaphysics. That address fills only thirty-five pages as against the forty-four pages of the present pamphlet. Is the public prosecutor prepared to deny the character of science to that address because of its brevity?

Who will not, on the contrary, appreciate that the very brevity imposed by circumstances makes the scientific inquiry contained in this work all the more difficult and the more considerable? I was compelled to condense my exposition within the compass of a two-hours' address, a pamphlet of forty-four pages, at the same time that I was obliged to conform my presentation of the matter to an audience on whose part I could assume no acquaintance with scientific methods and results. To overcome obstacles of this kind and, at the same time, not to fall short in point of profound scientific analysis, as was the case in the present instance, requires a degree of precision, close application and clarity of thought far in excess of what is demanded in these respects in the common run of more voluminous scientific works.

I return, therefore, again to the question: What is the requirement of science with respect to which this address falls short? Is it, perhaps, that it offends the canons of science in respect of the place in which it was held?

This, in fact, touches the substantial core of this indictment, and, at the same time, the sorest spot of the whole. This address might well--so runs the prosecutor's reflection--have been delivered wherever you like--from the professor's chair or from the rostrum of the singing school, before the so-called élite of the educated people; but that it was actually delivered before the actual people, that it was held before workingmen and addressed to workingmen, that fact deprives it of all standing as a scientific work and makes it a criminal offense,--_crimen novum atque inauditum_.[54]

I might, of course, content myself with the answer that the substance of an address, and therefore its scientific character, is in no way affected by the place in which it happens to have been delivered, whether it is in the Academy of Science, before the cream of the learned world, or in a hall in the suburbs before an audience of machinists.

But I owe you, Gentlemen, a somewhat fuller answer. To begin with, let me express my amazement at the fact that here in Berlin, in the city where Fichte delivered his immortal popular lectures on philosophy, his speeches on the fundamental features of the modern epoch and his speeches on the German nation before the general public, that in this place and day it should occur to any one to fancy that the place in which an address is delivered has anything whatever to do with its scientific character.

The great destiny of our age is precisely this--which the dark ages had been unable to conceive, much less to achieve--the dissemination of scientific knowledge among the body of the people. The difficulties of this task may be serious enough, and we may magnify them as we like,--still, our endeavors are ready to wrestle with them and our nightly vigils will be given to overcoming them.

In the general decay which, as all those who know the profounder realities of history appreciate, has overtaken European history in all its bearings, there are but two things that have retained their vigor and their propagating force in the midst of all that shriveling blight of self-seeking that pervades European life. These two things are science and the people, science and the workingman. And the union of these two is alone capable of invigorating European culture with a new life.

The union of these two polar opposites of modern society, science and the workingman,--when these two join forces they will crush all obstacles to cultural advance with an iron hand, and it is to this union that I have resolved to devote my life so long as there is breath in my body.

But, Gentlemen, is this view something new and entirely unheard-of in the realm of science? Let us see what Fichte himself, in his Addresses to the German People, has to say to the cultured classes, to whom he addresses these words: "It is particularly to the cultured classes of Germany that I wish to direct my remarks in the present address, for it is to these classes I hope in the first place to make myself intelligible. And I implore these classes, then, as the first step to be taken, to take the initiative in the work of reconstruction, and so, on the one hand, atone for their past deeds, and, on the other hand, earn the right to continued life in the future.

It will appear in the course of this address that hitherto all the advance in the German nation has originated with the common people, and that hitherto all the great national interests have, in the first instance, been the affair of the people, have been taken in hand and pushed forward by the body of the people; so that today for the first time does it happen that the initiative in the cultural advance of the nation is committed to the hands of the cultured classes, and if they will but accept the commission it will be the first time when such has been the case. It will presently appear that it is quite impossible for these classes to determine how long the matter will yet rest in their discretion, how long the choice will yet be open to them whether to take the initiative in this matter or not, for the whole matter is nearly ripe to be taken in hand by the people, and it will be carried out by men sprung from the body of the people, who will presently be able to help themselves without assistance from us."

Fichte, then, knew and proclaimed this fact, that the realization of all the great national interests in the past has been the work of the common people and has never been carried out at the hands of the cultured classes. That, in spite of this knowledge, he turned to the cultured classes is due, as he himself says, to the hope he had of first and most readily making himself understood by them. It is because, in his apprehension, for the presentment of the matter to the people, the whole was, so he says, "only approaching readiness and maturity," but not yet ready and mature.

That it is possible today to do what in Fichte's time was recognized as the only fruitful thing to do, but, at the same time, as not then ready to be done, and therefore too serious to be undertaken,--this expresses the whole short step in advance that has been accomplished in Germany during the past fifty years; for you will seek in vain for the slightest progress on the part of the German government.

Fichte himself, in the passage cited, says that this advance is coming in the near future. This "near future" proves to have been fifty years removed, and I trust, Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Court, that you will all consider a fifty-years' interval long enough to satisfy the requirements of the "near future."

But the men who, undeterred by all the difficulties of the task, put all their energies into this stupendous undertaking of carrying scientific knowledge and scientific habits of thought among the body of the people,--are they fairly open to the accusation of having sought to incite the indigent classes to hatred of the well-to-do? Do they not thereby really deserve the thanks and the affection of the propertied classes, and of the bourgeoisie above all?

Whence arises the bourgeoisie's dread of the people in political matters?

Look back, in memory, to the months of March, April, and May, 1848. Have you forgotten how things looked here at that time? The power of the police was broken; the people filled all the streets and public places. And all streets, all public places and all the people in the hands of Karbe, Lindenmüller, and other reckless agitators like them,--men without knowledge, without intelligence, without culture, thrown into prominence by the storm which stirred our political life to its depths. The _bourgeoisie_, scared and faint hearted, hiding in their cellars, trembling every instant for fear of their property and their lives, which lay in the hands of these coarse agitators, and saved only by the fact that these agitators were too good-natured to make such use of their power as the bourgeoisie feared they would. The _bourgeoisie_, secretly praying for the reëstablishment of the police power and quaking with a fright which they have not yet forgotten, the recollection of which still leaves them incapable of taking up the political struggle.

How came it that in a city which proudly calls itself the metropolis of intelligence, in so great a city, in the home of the most brilliant intellects,--how came it that the people here for months together could be at the disposal of Karbe and Lindenmüller and could tremble before them in fear for their life and property. Where was the intelligence of Berlin? Where were the men of science and of insight? Where were you, Gentlemen?

A whole city is never cowardly.

But these men reflected and told one another: The people do not understand our ways of thinking; they do not even understand our speech. There is a great gulf between our scientific views and the ways of the multitude, between the speech of scientific discussion and the habits of thought of the people. They would not understand us. Therefore the floor belongs to the coarsest.

So they reflected and held their peace. Now, Gentlemen, are you quite sure that a political upheaval will never recur? Are you ready to swear that you have reached the end of historical development? Or are you willing to see your lives and property again at the mercy of a Karbe and a Lindenmüller?

If not, then your thanks are due to the men who have devoted themselves to the work of filling up that gulf which separates scientific thought and scientific speech from the people, and so to raze the barriers that divide the bourgeoisie and the people. Your thanks are due these men, who, at the expense of their utmost intellectual efforts, have undertaken a work whose results will redound to the profit of each and all of you. These men you should entertain at the prytaneum, not put under indictment.

The place in which this address was held, therefore, can also not afford ground for exception as to its scientific character.

I have now shown you conclusively that the production is a scientific work.

But if, contrary to all expectation, this should still be questioned, although I do not for a moment consider it possible that it should be questioned by men as enlightened as you are, Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Court; now, in such a case, I seek refuge in the privilege which is accorded every cobbler and which you can all the less deny me, viz., to submit a question of workmanship in my trade to the award of men expert in the trade.

In the last resort, the question as to the scientific character of a given work is a question for the men of the trade, and therefore a question which may not be decided on a basis of common education and common culture alone, and therefore also not by a court of law. The question at issue does not concern jurisprudence, with which you are necessarily familiar, but it concerns other sciences with which you may well be unfamiliar, although, as a matter of chance, you may, in your private capacity, not your capacity as jurists, also be acquainted with these matters.

It is true, you may answer this question in the affirmative, your competence extends that far. For in very many cases is the scientific character of a given work manifest, even to the commonly instructed intelligence.

But to pass a negative opinion in the face of the expert testimony to which I provisionally appeal as a subsidiary recourse;[55] to that your competence does not extend, for the nicer question, whether in a given case the most profound researches of science may not, with a view to their readier apprehension, be presented in a facile and popular form, whether this fact of a facile presentation may not itself mark a peculiarly high achievement of scientific endeavor, in which all traces of the struggle, all difficulties and all the refractoriness of the materials handled have been successfully eliminated and the whole has in the outcome been reduced to the simplest and clearest terms; where the result presented is a scientific work of art, which, in the words of Schiller, has risen above the limitations of human infirmity and moves with such ease and freedom as to give the impression that it offers but the free play of the auditor's own unfolding thought; to decide with confidence whether you have to deal with a scientific work of this class, and to decide it with that certainty and security that is required in order to pass a sentence, that is something of which none but men trained in the science are capable.

This question, therefore, I beg that the following gentlemen: Privy Councillor August Böckh, Efficient Privy Councillor Johannes Schultze, formerly Director of the Ministry of Public Worship, Professor Adolf Trendelenburg, Privy Councillor and Chief Librarian Dr. Pertz, Professor Leopold Ranke, Professor Theodor Mommsen, Privy Councillor Professor Hanssen, all members of the Royal Academy of Science, and as specialists capable of judging in the matter, be constituted a subsidiary tribunal to pass on the question, whether the address in question is not in the strict sense a scientific production.

But, if such is found to be the case, then, as I have already explained, it has nothing to do with the penal code.

I have permitted myself to go exhaustively into an exposition of this, my first ground of defense, because, for the sake of the country itself and the dignity and liberty of science, and for the sake of establishing once for all a precedent which shall bar out all similar endeavors of the public prosecutor in the future, it is incumbent on me to adjure you to acquit me under Article 20 of the Constitution.

But it is not that recourse to this article is necessary to protect my person from the penalty of the law.

For, even were it held that the present case comes within the competence of the penal code, the law appealed to has in no wise been violated, and the paragraph cited by the public prosecutor has no application.

Even this one exception, alone would suffice to set the indictment aside; viz., that no objection is taken to any given passage in which the specified offense is alleged to occur; so that the prosecution proceeds wholely on an allegation of bias, and in the baldest manner. The indictment runs against a bias; that is all. But a bias is not actionable.

But I am not to be permitted to dispose of my defense in so easy a manner. The accusation of having endeavored to incite the poor to hatred of the rich is an accusation of such a kind that, apart from all question of punishment, it is likely to injure any citizen's name and fame. This accusation is of such character that, even if it is formally disproven on legal ground, it may still leave the accused an object of suspicion. You will, accordingly, Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Court, take it simply as evidence of the respect I bear you when I now go on to clear my honor in your sight, with the same solicitude as that with which I have defended my freedom. To this end it is necessary for me to present the grounds of fact, as painstakingly as I have presented the grounds of law, on which this accusation is to be quashed, and you will, therefore, I am sure, hear me with the same forbearance if this second part of my defense turns out to be but little briefer than the first.

I am accused of having violated Section 100 of the penal code. This section reads as follows: "Any person who endangers or jeopardizes the public peace by publicly inciting the subjects of the State to hatred or to contempt of one another, is liable to punishment by a fine of not less than 20 and not more than 200 thalers, or by imprisonment of not less than one month and not more than two years."

This section of the law specifies three different conditions, which must be found to concur if it is to be applicable.

I. There must be incitement to hatred or to contempt;

II. This incitement must be directed to the detriment of given classes of the subjects of the State, and I am accordingly accused by the public prosecutor of having incited the class of the unpropertied against the class of the propertied;

III. This incitement must be of such a nature as to endanger the public peace.

These three conditions must concur, must combine, if the section of the law is to apply,--and not one of these conditions occurs.

As to I. There must be incitement to hatred and contempt; there can in the case before you be no question of this point, and for several reasons.

1. The offense specified in Section 100 cannot be committed except there be an intention to incite to hatred and contempt. A contingent incitement to hatred and contempt, an incitement by inadvertence, is in this case not conceivable. If such a contingent incitement, an unintended incitement to hatred and contempt, were conceivable, what would not the consequences be? We have, all of us, for instance, recently read certain speeches delivered in the upper house, which have, we will say, filled me,--and not me alone, Gentlemen, but along with me a very large part of the nation--with hatred and contempt to the point of distraction. Does it follow that the public prosecutor could take action against the speakers in question? He is not competent to do so, even aside from the political prerogative of the speakers, for, although such has been the effect of these speeches, the purpose of these gentlemen was assuredly not to stir up hatred and contempt. But it is equally true that no one can deny that the purpose of my address was to impart knowledge. The most that the public prosecutor can allege is that it was a matter of indifference to me if the knowledge imparted stirred up hatred and contempt,--an allegation without significance, since there is no such thing as an incitement to hatred and contempt by inadvertence.

But, in point of fact, a deliberate incitement of this kind is in the present case absolutely excluded for another reason, which at the same time establishes that the address in question could not even have had the effect of stirring up hatred and contempt. I, therefore, in order to prevent repetition, beg to present this reason in connection with the second, viz.: that my address could not have the effect of causing hatred and contempt.

I have, therefore, to say, as the second count under this head, that this address cannot possibly have had the effect of stirring up hatred and contempt, and _a fortiori_ cannot have had that intention.

On what grounds alone can hatred and contempt be deserved?

On the ground of viciousness, which in turn is an attribute of voluntary human actions alone. But in this address of mine, I show that the dominance of this principle of the bourgeoisie, against which I am by the public prosecutor accused of inciting to hatred and contempt, is but a stage of economic and ethical development, which is the outcome of historical necessity, and that its nonexistence is an utter impossibility and that it therefore has all the character of natural necessity that belongs to the developmental progress of the earth.

Do we hate Nature because we have to struggle with her? Because we have to strive to guide her processes and improve her products?

But there is the further question: How has the public prosecutor understood my pamphlet?