hlet I make frequent use of the words
"revolutionary" and "revolution;" although I do not speak of an
"imminent social revolution," as the public prosecutor alleges. What
I speak of is a social revolution which supervened in February, 1848.
But with this word, "revolution," the public prosecutor hopes to crush
me. For he, taking the word in its narrower legal sense alone, cannot
read this word, "revolution," without conjuring up before his fancy
the brandishing of pitchforks. But such is not the meaning of the word
in its scientific use, and the consistent use of the term in my
pamphlet might have apprised the public prosecutor of the fact that
the term is there employed in its alternative, scientific
signification. So, for instance, I speak of the development of the
territorial principality as a "revolutionary" phenomenon.

And so again, on the other hand, I expressly declare that the peasant
wars, which, assuredly, were sufficiently garnished with violence and
bloodshed,--I declare these wars to have been a movement which was
revolutionary only in the imagination of those who participated in
them, whereas they were in reality not a revolutionary, but a
reactionary movement.

The progress of industry which took place in the sixteenth century, on
the contrary, I repeatedly and constantly characterize as a "really
and veritably revolutionary fact" (page 7), although no sword was
drawn on its account. Likewise I characterize (page 7) the invention
of the spinning jenny in 1775 as a radical and effectual revolution.

Is this an abuse of language, or am I hereby introducing a novel use
of words in making use of the term "revolution" in this sense,--in
that I apply it to peaceful developments and deny it to sanguinary
disturbances!

The elder Schelling says (_Untersuchungen ueber das Wesen der
menschlichen Freiheit_, Vol. VII, p. 351): "The happy thought of
making freedom the all in all of Philosophy has not only made the
human intellect free as regards its own motives and effected a greater
change in this science in all directions than any earlier revolution,"
etc. The elder Schelling, at least, does not, like the public
prosecutor's fancy, see pitchforks flashing before his eyes at the
sound of the word "revolution." Applying the word, as he does, to the
effects wrought by a philosophical principle, he takes it, as I do, in
a sense which has no relation whatever to physical violence.

What, then, is the scientific me