cendi_ in
any one of the nontheological faculties, in a philosophical
faculty, e.g., the decision must necessarily have been reversed.
No one, not even Eichhorn himself, harbored the conceit that this
doctrine and its teaching was to be dealt with by the criminal
court. A teacher who spread abroad scientific teachings
subversive of theological doctrines was deprived of the
opportunity to proclaim his teaching from a theological chair;
but to call in the jailer to suppress him--to that depth of
subservience to absolutism had no one at that time descended.
Alas, that Eichhorn, the much berated, could not have lived to
see this day! With what admiration and with what gratification
would he have looked upon his "constitutional" successors!

Even in the days of Eichhorn's pietistical absolutism, with its
_ecclesia militans_ of obscurantism, there survived so much of a sense
of decency regarding the ancient traditions as to exempt the liberty
of scientific teaching from the indignity of that preventive censure
which in those days rendered repressive legislation superfluous. In
their search for some tenable and tangible criterion of the scientific
character of any publication, the men of that time, it is true, hit
upon a somewhat absurd one in making the test a test of bulk--books of
more than twenty forms were exempt from censure. But however awkward
the outcome, the aim of the provision is not to be denied.

These ancient traditions, with more than five hundred years of
prescriptive standing; this principle which prevailed by usage and
acceptance among all modern peoples long before it was embodied in
legal form; this primordial deliverance of the spiritual life of the
Germanic nations is the substantial fact which our modern society has
now finally embodied in Article 20 of the Constitution and so has
constituted a norm for the guidance of all later law-givers, in other
words: "Science and its teaching is free."

It is free without qualification, without limits, without bolts and
bars. Under established law everything has its limitations,--every
power, every function, every vested authority. The only thing which
remains without bounds or constituted limitation, whose privilege it
is to over-spread and to overlie all established facts, in such
boundless and unhindered freedom as the sun and the air, is the
irradiating force of theoretical research.

Scientific theory must be free even to the length of license.
For, ev