work?  The prosecutor seems to feel himself hampered by the fact that he has here to do with a scientific production, for he begins his indictment with the sentence:  “While the accused has assumed an appearance of scientific inquiry, his discussion at all points is of a practical bearing.”  The appearance of scientific inquiry?  And why is it the appearance only?  I call upon the prosecutor to show why only the appearance of scientific inquiry is to be imputed to this scientific publication.  I believe that in a question as to what is scientific and what not, I am more competent to speak than the public prosecutor.

In various and difficult fields of science I have published voluminous works; I have spared no pains and no midnight vigils in the endeavor to widen the scope of science itself, and, I believe, I can in this matter say with Horace:  Militavi non sine gloria.[52] But I declare to you:  Never, not in the most voluminous of my works, have I written a line that was more carefully thought out in strict conformity to scientific truth than this production is from its first page to its last.  And I assert further that not only is this brochure a scientific work, as so many another may be that presents in combination results already known, but that it is in many respects a scientific achievement, a development of new scientific conceptions.

What is the criterion by which the scientific standing of a book is to be judged?  None else, of course, than its contents.

I beg you, therefore, to take a look at the contents of this pamphlet.  Its content is nothing else than a philosophy of history, condensed in the compass of forty-four pages, beginning with the Middle Ages and coming down to the present.  It is a development of that objective unfolding of rational thought which has lain at the root of European history for more than a thousand years past; it is an exposition of that inner soul of things resident in the process of history that manifests itself in the apparently opaque, empirical sequence of events and which has produced this historical sequence out of its own moving, creative force.  It is, in spite of the brief compass of the pamphlet, the strictly developed proof that history is nothing else than the self-accomplishing, by inner necessity increasingly progressive unfolding of reason and of freedom, achieving itself under the mask of apparently mere external and material relations.

In the brief compass of this pamphlet, I pass three great periods of the world’s history in review before the reader; and for each one I point out that it proceeds on a single comprehensive idea, which controls all the various, apparently unrelated, fields of development and all the different and widely-scattered phenomena that fall within the period in question; and I show that each of these periods is but the necessary forerunner and preparation for the succeeding period, and that each succeeding period is the peculiar and imminently necessary continuation, the consequence and unavoidable consummation of the preceding period, and that these together, consequently, constitute a comprehensive and logically inseparable whole.