Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 10.djvu/546

 reasons to the like effect have already been recited and I will not take up your time with their repetition and further development. Here, then, is the first hiatus in the public prosecutor's argument.

In the second place, if it actually follows in any given case that hatred and contempt is, for a normally constituted human being, the necessary consequence of a scientific knowledge of the facts, such hatred and contempt could by no means be laid under penalties by the legislator.

Whatever institution is so vicious that knowledge of it necessarily excites hatred and contempt, that institution should be hated and despised.

The legislator lays penalties upon such hatred and contempt as are but the effects produced by blind emotions and passions. But he has not imposed penalties upon human reason and the moral constitution of man. He consequently does not impose penalties upon hatred and contempt which are the necessary outcome of these two features of human nature. The public prosecutor construes section 100 to the effect that the legislator has therein intended to prohibit the use of reason and proscribe the moral nature of man. But such a purpose has not entered the thoughts of the law-giver. No court will put such a construction upon the law as to make the legislator the avowed enemy of intelligence and science,—and here come into bearing again all the arguments of my defense directed to Article 20 of the Constitution. The only meaning of these arguments in this connection is that even if science and its teaching were not by Article 20 of the Constitution exempt from the application of the criminal code, still section 100, except it be construed to intend the utter destruction of human nature, cannot be leveled against such hatred and contempt as is the necessary outcome of scientific knowledge.

In the third place, hatred and contempt of a given institutional arrangement or expedient is by no means the same thing as hatred and contempt of those persons who profit