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

it on to your children. Thus do we mortals achieve
immortality in the permanent things which we create in common.

If you always keep that in mind you will find a meaning in life and
work and acquire the right attitude towards other nations and ages.

Paradise Lost

As late as the seventeenth century the savants and artists of all
Europe were so closely united by the bond of a common ideal that
co-operation between them was scarcely affected by political events. This
unity was further strengthened by the general use of the Latin language.

To-day we look back at this state of affairs as at a lost paradise. The
passions of nationalism have destroyed this community of the intellect, and
the Latin language, which once united the whole world, is dead. The men of
learning have become the chief mouthpieces of national tradition and lost
their sense of an intellectual commonwealth.

Nowadays we are faced with the curious fact that the politicians, the
practical men of affairs, have become the exponents of international ideas.
It is they who have created the League of Nations.


Religion and Science

Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with
the satisfaction of felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to keep
this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and
their development. Feeling and desire are the motive forces behind all human
endeavour and human creation, in however exalted a guise the latter may
present itself to us. Now what are the feelings and needs that have led men
to religious thought and belief in the widest sense of the words? A little
consideration will suffice to show us that the most varying emotions preside
over the birth of religious thought and experience. With primitive man it is
above all fear that evokes religious notions--fear of hunger, wild beasts,
sickness, death. Since at this stage of existence understanding of causal
connexions is usually poorly developed, the human mind creates for itself
more or less analogous beings on whose wills and actions these fearful
happenings depend. One's object now is to secure the favour of these beings
by carrying out actions and offering sacrifices which, according to the
tradition handed down from generation to generation, propitiate them or make
them well disposed towards a mortal. I am speaking now of the religion of
fear. This, though not created, is in an important degree stabilized by the
formation of a special priestly caste which sets up as a mediator between
the people and the beings they fear, and erects a hegemony on this basis. In
many cases the leader or ruler whose position depends on other factors, or a
privileged class, combines priestly functions with its secular authority in
order to make the latter more secure; or the political rulers and the
priestly caste make common cause in their own interests.

The social feelings are another source of the crystallization of
religion. Fathers and mothers and the leaders of larger human communities
are mortal and fallible. The desire for guidance, love, and support prompts
men to form the social or moral conception of God. This is the God of
Providence who protects, disposes, rewards, and punishes, the God who,
according to the width of the believer's outlook, loves and cherishes the
life of the tribe or of the human race, or even life as such, the comforter
in sorrow and unsatisfied longing, who preserves the souls of the dead. This
is the social or moral conception of God.

The Jewish scriptures admirably illustrate the development from the
religion of fear to moral religion, which is continued in the New Testament.
The religions of all civilized peoples, especially the peoples of the
Orient, are primarily moral religions. The development from a religion of
fear to moral religion is a great step in a nation's life. That primitive
religions are based entirely on fear and the religions of civilized peoples
purely on morality is a prejudice against which we must be on our guard. The
truth is that they are all intermediate types, with this reservation, that
on the higher levels of social life the religion of morality predominates.

Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their
conception of God. Only individuals of exceptional endowments and
exceptionally high-minded communities, as a general rule, get in any real
sense beyond this level. But there is a third state of religious experience
which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form,
and which I will call cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to
explain this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as
there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.

The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims and the
sublimity and marvellous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in
the world of thought. He looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison
and wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The
beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear in earlier stages of
development--e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the
Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learnt from the wonderful writings of
Schopenhauer especially, contains a much stronger element of it.

The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind
of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's
image; so that there can be no Church whose central teachings are based on
it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men
who were filled with the highest kind of religious feeling and were in many
cases regarded by their contemporaries as Atheists, sometimes also as
saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and
Spinoza are closely akin to one another.

How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to
another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology?
In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken
this feeling and keep it alive in those who are capable of it.

We thus arrive at a conception of the relation of science to religion
very different from the usual one. When one views the matter historically
one is inclined to look upon science and religion as irreconcilable
antagonists, and for a very obvious reason. The man who is thoroughly
convinced of the universal operation of the law of causation cannot for a
moment entertain the idea of a being who interferes in the course of
events--that is, if he takes the hypothesis of causality really seriously.
He has no use for the religion of fear and equally little for social or
moral religion. A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him for
the simple reason that a man's actions are determined by necessity, external
and internal, so that in God's eyes he cannot be responsible, any more than
an inanimate object is responsible for the motions it goes through. Hence
science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is
unjust. A man's ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy,
education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would
indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear and punishment
and hope of reward after death.

It is therefore easy to see why the Churches have always fought science
and persecuted its devotees. On the other hand, I maintain that cosmic
religious feeling is the strongest and noblest incitement to scientific
research. Only those who realize the immense efforts and, above all, the
devotion which pioneer work in theoretical science demands, can grasp the
strength of the emotion out of which alone such work, remote as it is from
the immediate realities of life, can issue. What a deep conviction of the
rationality of the universe and what a yearning to understand, were it but a
feeble reflection of the mind revealed in this world, Kepler and Newton must
have had to enable them to spend years of solitary labour in disentangling
the principles of celestial mechanics! Those whose acquaintance with
scientific research is derived chiefly from its practical results easily
develop a completely false notion of the mentality of the men who,
surrounded by a sceptical world, have shown the way to those like-minded
with themselves, scattered through the earth and the centuries. Only one who
has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid realization of what
has inspired these men and given them the strength to remain true to their
purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious feeling that
gives a man strength of this sort. A contemporary has said, not unjustly,
that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are
the only profoundly religious people.

The Religiousness of Science

You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds
without a peculiar religious feeling of his own. But it is different from
the religion of the naive man. For the latter God is a being from whose care
one hopes to benefit and whose punishment one fears; a sublimation of a