The world as I see it - Albert Einstein (easy books to read .txt) 📗

up by the tie of
sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer
life depend on the labours of other men, living and dead, and that I must
exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am
still receiving. I am strongly drawn to the simple life and am often
oppressed by the feeling that I am engrossing an unnecessary amount of the
labour of my fellow-men. I regard class differences as contrary to justice
and, in the last resort, based on force. I also consider that plain living
is good for everybody, physically and mentally.

In human freedom in the philosophical sense I am definitely a
disbeliever. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in
accordance with inner necessity. Schopenhauer's saying, that "a man can do
as he will, but not will as he will," has been an inspiration to me since my
youth up, and a continual consolation and unfailing well-spring of patience
in the face of the hardships of life, my own and others'. This feeling
mercifully mitigates the sense of responsibility which so easily becomes
paralysing, and it prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too
seriously; it conduces to a view of life in which humour, above all, has its
due place.

To inquire after the meaning or object of one's own existence or of
creation generally has always seemed to me absurd from an objective point of
view. And yet everybody has certain ideals which determine the direction of
his endeavours and his judgments. In this sense I have never looked upon
ease and happiness as ends in themselves--such an ethical basis I call more
proper for a herd of swine. The ideals which have lighted me on my way and
time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Without the sense of fellowship with men of
like mind, of preoccupation with the objective, the eternally unattainable
in the field of art and scientific research, life would have seemed to me
empty. The ordinary objects of human endeavour--property, outward success,
luxury--have always seemed to me contemptible.

My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has
always contrasted oddly with my pronounced freedom from the need for direct
contact with other human beings and human communities. I gang my own gait
and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my
immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties I have
never lost an obstinate sense of detachment, of the need for solitude--a
feeling which increases with the years. One is sharply conscious, yet
without regret, of the limits to the possibility of mutual understanding and
sympathy with one's fellow-creatures. Such a person no doubt loses something
in the way of geniality and light-heartedness ; on the other hand, he is
largely independent of the opinions, habits, and judgments of his fellows
and avoids the temptation to take his stand on such insecure foundations.

My political ideal is that of democracy. Let every man be respected as
an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have
been the recipient of excessive admiration and respect from my fellows
through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the
desire, unattainable for many, to understand the one or two ideas to which I
have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite
aware that it is necessary for the success of any complex undertaking that
one man should do the thinking and directing and in general bear the
responsibility. But the led must not be compelled, they must be able to
choose their leader. An autocratic system of coercion, in my opinion, soon
degenerates. For force always attracts men of low morality, and I believe it
to be an invariable rule that tyrants of genius are succeeded by scoundrels.
For this reason I have always been passionately opposed to systems such as
we see in Italy and Russia to-day. The thing that has brought discredit upon
the prevailing form of democracy in Europe to-day is not to be laid to the
door of the democratic idea as such, but to lack of stability on the part of
the heads of governments and to the impersonal character of the electoral
system. I believe that in this respect the United States of America have
found the right way. They have a responsible President who is elected for a
sufficiently long period and has sufficient powers to be really responsible.
On the other hand, what I value in our political system is the more
extensive provision that it makes for the individual in case of illness or
need. The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not
the State but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone
creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in
thought and dull in feeling.

This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of the herd nature, the
military system, which I abhor. That a man can take pleasure in marching in
formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has
only been given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed. This
plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed.
Heroism by order, senseless violence, and all the pestilent nonsense that
does by the name of patriotism--how I hate them! War seems to me a mean,
contemptible thing: I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in
such an abominable business. And yet so high, in spite of everything, is my
opinion of the human race that I believe this bogey would have disappeared
long ago, had the sound sense of the nations not been systematically
corrupted by commercial and political interests acting through the schools
and the Press.

The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the
fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is
as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of
mystery--even if mixed with fear--that engendered religion. A knowledge of
the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the
profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to
our reason in their most elementary forms--it is this knowledge and this
emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in
this alone, I am a deeply religious man. I cannot conceive of a God who
rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we
are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical
death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such
notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls. Enough for me
the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvellous
structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavour to
comprehend a portion, be it never so tiny, of the reason that manifests
itself in nature.

The Liberty of Doctrine--Ю propos of the Guntbel Case


Academic chairs are many, but wise and noble teachers are few;
lecture-rooms are numerous and large, but the number of young people who
genuinely thirst after truth and justice is small. Nature scatters her
common wares with a lavish hand, but the choice sort she produces but
seldom. We all know that, so why complain? Was it not ever thus and will it
not ever thus remain? Certainly, and one must take what Nature gives as one
finds it. But there is also such a thing as a spirit of the times, an
attitude of mind characteristic of a particular generation, which is passed
on from individual to individual and gives a society its particular tone.
Each of us has to do his little bit towards transforming this spirit of the
times.

Compare the spirit which animated the youth in our universities a
hundred years ago with that prevailing to-day. They had faith in the
amelioration of human society, respect for every honest opinion, the
tolerance for which our classics had lived and fought. In those days men
strove for a larger political unity, which at that time was called Germany.
It was the students and the teachers at the universities who kept these
ideals alive.

To-day also there is an urge towards social progress, towards tolerance
and freedom of thought, towards a larger political unity, which we to-day
call Europe. But the students at our universities have ceased as completely
as their teachers to enshrine the hopes and ideals of the nation. Anyone who
looks at our times coolly and dispassionately must admit this.

We are assembled to-day to take stock of ourselves. The external reason
for this meeting is the Gumbel case. This apostle of justice has written
about unexpiated political crimes with devoted industry, high courage, and
exemplary fairness, and has done the community a signal service by his
books. And this is the man whom the students, and a good many of the staff,
of his university are to-day doing their best to expel.