Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 10.djvu/502

 point, or to restrain its bearing upon any given situation, is not only guilty of cutting off the sources of progress, but he is guilty of a breach of the public peace and of endangering the stability of the State. It is through the means of such scientific inquiry and its work of painstaking elaboration that the exigencies of a progressively changing situation are enabled gradually, and without harm, to have their effect upon men's thinking and upon human relations, and so to pass into the life of society. Whoever obstructs scientific inquiry clamps down the safety valve of public opinion, and puts the State in train for an explosion. He prohibits science from finding out the malady and its remedy, and he thereby substitutes the resulting convulsions of the death struggle for a diagnosis and a judicious treatment.

Unrestrained freedom of scientific teaching is, accordingly, not only an inalienable right of the individual, but, what is more to the point, it is, primarily and most particularly, a necessity of life to the community; it involves the life of the State itself.

Therefore has society formulated the provision that "Science and its teaching is free," without qualification, without condition, without limits; and this proviso is incorporated into the Constitution, in order to make it plain that it must remain inviolate even at the hands of the lawgiver himself, that even he must not for a moment overlook or disregard it. And so it serves as pledge of the continual peaceable development of social life down to the remotest generations.

Does a question present itself at this point, Gentlemen? Am I setting up a new and unheard-of theory on this head! Am I, possibly, misconstruing the wording of the Constitution in order to extricate myself from an embarrassing criminal process?

On the contrary, nothing is easier than to prove to you from the evidences of history that this provision of the Constitution has never been taken in any other sense; that for long centuries before the days of the Constitution this