Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 10.djvu/556

 public prosecutor alleges. What I speak of is a social revolution which supervened in February, 1848. But with this word, "revolution," the public prosecutor hopes to crush me. For he, taking the word in its narrower legal sense alone, cannot read this word, "revolution," without conjuring up before his fancy the brandishing of pitch-forks. But such is not the meaning of the word in its scientific use, and the consistent use of the term in my pamphlet might have apprised the public prosecutor of the fact that the term is there employed in its alternative, scientific signification. So, for instance, I speak of the development of the territorial principality as a "revolutionary" phenomenon.

And so again, on the other hand, I expressly declare that the peasant wars, which, assuredly, were sufficiently garnished with violence and bloodshed,—I declare these wars to have been a movement which was revolutionary only in the imagination of those who participated in them, whereas they were in reality not a revolutionary, but a reactionary movement.

The progress of industry which took place in the sixteenth century, on the contrary, I repeatedly and constantly characterize as a "really and veritably revolutionary fact" (page 7), although no sword was drawn on its account. Likewise I characterize (page 7) the invention of the spinning jenny in 1775 as a radical and effectual revolution.

Is this an abuse of language, or am I hereby introducing a novel use of words in making use of the term "revolution" in this sense,—in that I apply it to peaceful developments and deny it to sanguinary disturbances?

The elder Schelling says (Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, Vol. VII, p. 351): "The happy thought of making freedom the all in all of Philosophy has not only made the human intellect free as regards its own motives and effected a greater change in this science in all directions than any earlier revolution," etc. The elder Schelling, at least, does not, like the public