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.