"To believe such a thing possible is a proof how limited an idea exists of the eager inquiry going on after knowledge--and truth, the source and origin of all knowledge. There will always be so eager a demand for a history of the Present time, that, even should _I_ be prevented, ten others would arise, only to proclaim the louder, and to repeat the oftener, the truth which is here suppressed. To believe that the philosophy of History can be silenced by persecution, argues an entire ignorance even of the external mechanism of philosophy. A political pamphlet, intended to serve a particular purpose at a particular period, may be suppressed. The author of such a pamphlet, bent on agitation, can easily console himself for its suppression. It has cost him little time and trouble; it is only a means to an end, one means out of many means, any of which, when this is lost, will serve the author as well. But it is not thus with philosophical works, it is not thus with the work before me. This book is deeply rooted in the vocation of my whole life, and is the end of my philosophical research; I have prepared myself for it by the labor of years, and the labor of years will be necessary for its completion. I have reached a time of life when I can neither change my vocation, nor even cease to labor in this vocation. I am also so imbued with my philosophy, that even if I could change I would not. I may be hindered in the prosecution of this work for four months, but in the fifth I shall return to it. For a judicial sentence cannot arrest (like a mere pamphlet) the philosophical scheme interwoven into a whole existence." "If it is possible that this 'Introduction' can be condemned in Germany, that it can be prohibited, that by these means the work should be strangled in its birth, then the philosophy of history has no longer a place in Germany. The tribunal of Baden will have given the first blow, in pronouncing judgment on a matter which is purely philosophical, and Germany, whose freedom of philosophical research has been her pride and her boast, of which even the various administrations of the nation have never been jealous, will receive a shock such as she never before sustained."