Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 10.djvu/528

 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 fails 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? Rut 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