cerned is a scientific 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