Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred not from a lack of understanding, but from a lack of resolution and courage to use it without the direction of another. Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding! That is the motto of Enlightenment.

Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a portion of mankind, after nature has long released them from external guidance (naturaliter maiorennes), nevertheless remains gladly under lifelong tutelage, and why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so convenient to be immature! If I have a book that understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a physician who decides my diet, and so forth, I need not trouble myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay; others will readily undertake the irksome work for me.

That the step to competence is held to be very dangerous by the far greater portion of mankind, and that by nature they are incapable of making use of their own understanding, is something those guardians themselves ensure. Having first made their domestic cattle dumb and carefully preventing the quiet creatures from daring to take a single step beyond the harness in which they have bound them, these guardians then show them the danger that threatens them should they attempt to walk alone. Now this danger is not really so great, for they would certainly learn to walk after a few falls; but an example of this kind makes them timid, and ordinarily frightens them out of all further attempts.

Yet it is more difficult to release the public from immaturity, or rather to put them in a position to do so themselves; for laziness and cowardice have erected this very tutelage as their trademark. The public can achieve enlightenment only slowly. A revolution may well put an end to autocratic despotism, to rapacious or power-seeking oppression, but it can never produce a true reform in ways of thinking; rather, new prejudices, like the old ones, will serve as a leash for the great unthinking mass.

For enlightenment, however, nothing is required but freedom, namely the freedom to make public use of one's reason in all matters. Now I call the public use of one's reason that use which anyone makes of it as a scholar before the entire reading public. But I call the private use that use which one may make of it in a particular civil post or office with which he is entrusted. The public use of one's reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among mankind; the private use, by contrast, may often be very narrowly restricted without preventing the progress of enlightenment.

Thus it would be very disastrous if an officer, receiving an order from his superiors, were to argue in public about the appropriateness or usefulness of that order, while obeying it; the same applies to a citizen who cannot refuse to pay the taxes imposed upon him. But the same person, acting as a scholar, addressing the true public, the world of readers, can freely and publicly voice his thoughts on the inadequacy of such impositions, or even submit to the judgment of the public his remarks and suggestions concerning a better arrangement. This spirit of freedom spreads even beyond the boundaries of government, where it finds a civil constitution which no one knows better than the general public itself how to value; for it does itself arise from the germ of enlightenment.