Finally, what is the result of liberal science but that which one – that is, the uneducated masses indulging their passions – desires and knows? Anyone, however, who does not offer to the times something that extends and leads beyond the present time, which is awkward to contemporaries precisely for this reason, will go unrewarded.
The three fruits of our education are as follows: poor eyesight, utter revulsion for everything that once was, and inaptitude for the future.
At the conclusion of these lines, which were meant only to provoke my readers’ own reflections, I should be permitted to address the Jewish question that has now become so urgent, since only those sharing my fundamental views on the value of education can answer this question properly.
The agitation among young people is widespread; the older generations usually think the same way as the younger ones, but they keep quiet for a number of reasons.
Some 70 Berliners, including not a few members of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, have tried to calm that excitement with a declaration issued on November 12, 1880. One can only strongly hope that the scholarly achievements of these men are worth more than their political ones. Their writing is bad, and they do extreme violence to the facts – something that is impermissible even when leaders are in a momentary state of agitation.
No one in Germany contemplates, as those people claim, sinning against the so-called tolerance with respect to Jews. In fact, the Germans’ capacity for intolerance seems to have been exhausted by the achievements of the Falk ministry: No one has ever prevented Jews living in Germany from circumcising their sons, eating kosher foods, and keeping the Sabbath and as well as all Jewish holidays.
It is difficult to deny that there are, as those notables affirm, Christians of all parties who deem religion to be the tiding of peace; it would be desirable, however, to have a closer explanation of that sentence, which, in its current formulation, fails to express the nature of the Christian creed.
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