never disappearing, forever growing, from the earliest
beginnings of the Ionic philosophy, unfolding in an ever-increasing
amplitude, outleaping all else, spreading from one nation and from one
people to another, and handed down, with devout reverence, from age to
age, there remains the stately growth of scientific knowledge.

And what is the source of all that unremitting progress, of all that
uninterruptedly, but insensibly, broadening amelioration which we see
peacefully accomplishing itself in the course of history, if it is not
this same scientific knowledge? And, this being so, science must have
its way without restraint; for science there is nothing fixed and
definite, to which its process of chemical analysis may not be
applied, nothing sacred, no _noli me tangere_. Without free scientific
inquiry, therefore, there is no outcome but stagnation, decline and
barbarism. And, while free scientific inquiry is the perennial
fountain-head of all progress in human affairs, this inquiry and its
gradually extending sway over men's convictions, is at the same time
the only guarantee of a peaceable advance. Whoever stops up this
fountain, whoever attempts to prevent its flowing at any point, or to
restrain its bearing upon any given situation, is not only guilty of
cutting off the sources of progress, but he is guilty of a breach of
the public peace and of endangering the stability of the State. It is
through the means of such scientific inquiry and its work of
painstaking elaboration that the exigencies of a progressively
changing situation are enabled gradually, and without harm, to have
their effect upon men's thinking and upon human relations, and so to
pass into the life of society. Whoever obstructs scientific inquiry
clamps down the safety valve of public opinion, and puts the State in
train for an explosion. He prohibits science from finding out the
malady and its remedy, and he thereby substitutes the resulting
convulsions of the death struggle for a diagnosis and a judicious
treatment.

Unrestrained freedom of scientific teaching is, accordingly, not only
an inalienable right of the individual, but, what is more to the
point, it is, primarily and most particularly, a necessity of life to
the community; it involves the life of the State itself.

Therefore has society formulated the provision that "Science and its
teaching is free," without qualification, without condition, without
limits; and this proviso is in