One who gives himself up to work of this kind is entitled to address your public prosecutor in the words of Archimedes, when, at the sacking of Syracuse, he was set upon, sword in hand, by the savage soldiery while drawing and studying his mathematical figures in the sand:  “Noli turbare circulos meos."[53]

To enable me to write this pamphlet, five different sciences, and more than that, have had to be brought into cooeperation and had to be mastered:  History in the narrower sense of the term, Jurisprudence and the History of Law, Political Economy, Statistics, Finance, and, last and most difficult of the sciences, the science of thought, or Philosophy.

What a paragon of scientific erudition must the public prosecutor be, in whose eyes all this is not sufficient to lend a publication the attribute of scientific quality.

But the indictment itself, when it is more closely examined, is seen to assign the ground on which this work is held to lack the requisite scientific character.  The indictment says:  “While the defendant, Lassalle, has been at pains to give himself the appearance of scientific method in this address, still the address is after all of a thoroughly practical bearing.”

So it appears, then, that, according to the public prosecutor, the address is not scientific because it is claimed to have a practical bearing.  The test of scientific adequacy, according to the public prosecutor, is the absence of practical bearing.  I may fairly be permitted to ask the public prosecutor—­and it is a Schelling whose signature this indictment bears—­where he has learned all this.  From his father?  Assuredly not.  Schelling the elder assigns philosophy no less serious a task than that of transforming the entire cultural epoch.  “It is conceived to be too much,” says he in formulating an anticipated objection, “to expect that philosophy shall rehabilitate the times.”  To this his answer is:  “But when I claim to see in philosophy a means whereby to remedy the confusion of the times, I have, of course, in mind not an impotent philosophy, not simply a product of workman-like dexterity, but a forceful philosophy which can face the facts of life, philosophy which, far from feeling itself impotent before the stupendous realities of life, far from confining itself to the dreary business of simple negation and destruction, draws its force from reality and, therefore, reaches effective and enduring results.”

The public prosecutor, with his brand-new and highly extraordinary discovery, will scarcely find much comfort with the other men of the science.

In his Address to the German People, Fichte tells us:  “What, then, is the bearing of our endeavors even in the most recondite of the sciences?  Grant that the proximate end of these endeavors is that of propagating these sciences from generation to generation, and so conserving them; but why are they to be conserved?  Manifestly only in 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.”