The World As I See It
- Albert Einstein -
How
strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief
sojourn; for what purpose be knows not, though he sometimes thinks
he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily
life that one exists for other people-first of all for those upon
whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent,
and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are
bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind
myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors 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 a frugal life and am often oppressively
aware that I am engrossing an undue amount of the labor of my
fellow-men. I regard class distinctions as unjustified and, in the
last resort, based on force. I also believe that a simple and
unassuming life is good for everybody, physically and
mentally.
I do not
at all believe in human freedom in the philosophical sense.
Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in
accordance with inner necessity. Schopenhauer‘s saying, "A man can
do what he wants,but not want what he wants," has been a very real
inspiration to me since my youth; it has been a continual
consolation in the face of life‘s hardships, my own and others‘,
and an unfailing well-spring of tolerance. This realization
mercifully mitigates the easily paralyzing sense of responsibility
and prevents us from taking ourselves and other people all too
seriously; it is conducive to a view of life which, in particular,
gives humor its due.
To inquire
after the meaning or object of one‘s own existence or that of all
creatures has always seemed to me absurd from an objective point of
view. And yet everybody has certain ideals which determine the
direction of his endeavors and his judgments. In this sense I have
never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves-this
ethical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals which have
lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to
face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth.
Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the
occupation with the objective world,the eternally unattainable in
the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed
to me empty. The trite objects of human efforts-possessions,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 lack of need for direct
contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a
"lone traveler" and have never belonged to my country, my home, my
friend, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the
face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a
need for solitude-feelings which increase with the years. One
becomes sharply aware, but without regret,of the limits of mutual
understanding and consonance with other people. No doubt, such a
person loses some of his innocence and unconcern; on the other
hand, he is largely independent, of the opinions, habits, and
judgments of his fellows and avoids the temptation to build his
inner equilibrium upon such insecure foundations.
My
political ideal is 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
reverence from my fellow-being, through no fault, and no merit, of
my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for
many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble
powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that
it is necessary for the achievement of the objective of an
organization that one man should do the thinking and directing and
generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced,
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 today. The thing that has brought
discredit upon the form of democracy as it exists in Europe today
is not to be laid to the door of the democratic principle as such,
but to the lack of stability 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
President powers really to exercise his responsibility. What I
value, on the other hand, in the German 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 political 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 herd
life, the military system,which I abhor. That a man can take
pleasure in marching in fours to the strains of a band is enough to
make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by
mistake; unprotected spinal marrow was all he needed. This
plaguespot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible
speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the
loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how
passionately I hate them! How vile and despicable seems war to me!
I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an
abominable business. My opinion of the human race is high enough
that I believe this bogey would have disappeared long ago, had the
sound sense of the peoples not been systematically corrupted by
commercial and political interests acting through the schools and
the Press.
The most
beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the
fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true
science . Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no
longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was
the experience of mystery - even if mixed with fear - that
engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we
cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the
most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are
accessible to our minds - it is this knowledge and this emotion
that constitute true religiosity; in this sense, and in this alone,
I am a deeply religious man. I can not conceive of a God who
rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that
we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to
conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let
feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I
am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the
awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing
world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion,
be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in
nature
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