Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 10.djvu/517

 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 1850—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