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 falls 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?  But 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 pamphlet of forty-four pages, at the same time that I was obliged to conform my presentation of the matter to an audience on whose part I could assume no acquaintance with scientific methods and results.  To overcome obstacles of this kind and, at the same time, not to fall short in point of profound scientific analysis, as was the case in the present instance, requires a degree of precision, close application and clarity of thought far in excess of what is demanded in these respects in the common run of more voluminous scientific works.

I return, therefore, again to the question:  What is the requirement of science with respect to which this address falls short?  Is it, perhaps, that it offends the canons of science in respect of the place in which it was held?

This, in fact, touches the substantial core of this indictment, and, at the same time, the sorest spot of the whole.  This address might well—­so runs the prosecutor’s reflection—­have been delivered wherever you like—­from the professor’s chair or from the rostrum of the singing school, before the so-called elite of the educated people; but that it was actually delivered before the actual people, that it was held before workingmen and addressed to workingmen, that fact deprives it of all standing as a scientific work and makes it a criminal offense,—­crimen novum atque inauditum.[54]