With regard to higher literature, and indeed all writings not connected with science, Einstein has little to say. He himself rarely directs conversation on to this topic, and still less rarely does he give vent to an enthusiastic outburst that betrays warm interest. He restricts himself to making short, aphoristic comments, and now and then allows his listener to gather that he can easily imagine an existence without literature. The number of accepted novels, tales, and poetic works which he has not read is legion, and all the pretentiously artistic, historical, and critical writings that are added to them have attracted only a very momentary interest from him.
I have never seen him attracted in any way by the promising aspect of some new book intended for diversion. If such a one happens to get into his hands, he merely places it among the others. At times I was constrained to think of Caliph Omar's words: "If the book contains what is already in the Koran, it is unnecessary; if it contains something else, it is harmful." It is harmful at least in the sense that it robs us of time that may be better spent in another way. I am purposely exaggerating here to make it quite clear that Einstein finds full satisfaction in a narrow circle of literature, and that he experiences no loss if numerous new works pass by and escape his notice.
Nevertheless, he speaks with reverence of a series of authors, to whom he owes enrichment: among them are the classical writers, who naturally occupy the highest position, with certain exceptions, which he equally naturally wishes to be taken as a personal opinion and not in the sense of a critical valuation. With him the difference reveals itself in the intonation from which we may read a greater or lesser measure of affection. When he says "Shakespeare," the eternal greatness seems to be inherent in the actual sound of the name. When he says "Goethe," we notice a slight undertone of dissonance, which may be interpreted without difficulty. He admires him with the pathos of distance, but no warmth glows through this pathos.
I had ventured to deduce from my knowledge of his nature the men and the works which, in my opinion, should awaken strong echoes in him. A fairly clearly defined line leads to the true path. Outside of any systematic series, I may mention Dostojewski, Cervantes, Homer, Strindberg, Gottfried Keller in the positive sense, Emile Zola and Ibsen in the negative sense. Taken as a whole, this prognostication does not disagree seriously with his own statement, excepting that he lays still greater emphasis on Don Quixote and the Brothers Karamasoff than I had surmised. He expressed himself with reserve about Voltaire. He has no belief in Voltaire's poetic qualities, and sees in him only a subtle-minded and amusing writer. Perhaps if Einstein were to devote himself a little more intensively to Voltaire and Zola, he would assign a higher value to these related spirits. But there is little hope of this occurring, as the wide range of Voltaire's works tends to restrain him. Time, which the physicist Einstein has shown to be relative, has an absolute value for him when measured in hours, and whoever seeks to persuade him to read thick volumes is not likely to gain his goodwill.
Our philosophical literature is not received with acclamation by him. If some one wished to undertake the task of ascertaining Einstein's attitude towards philosophy, he would be well advised to plunge into Einstein's works rather than to ask him personally. In them the questioner would find ample hints, pointing towards a new theory of knowledge, the first indications of which are already perceptible. A great portion of philosophic doctrine will yet have to pass through the Einstein filter to be purified. He himself, it seems to me, leaves this process of filtering mostly to other thinkers, but we must not lose sight of the fact that these others derive their views of space, time, and causality from Einstein's physics. It is thus immediately evident that he does not find revelations about ultimate things in already extant literature, for the simple reason that they are not to be found there. For him famous works represent, in Kant's language, "Prolegomena to every future system of metaphysics which can claim to rank as a science." The accent is to be put on the future that has not yet become the present. He praises many, particularly Locke and Hume, but will grant finality to none, not even to the great Kant, not to mention Hegel, Schelling, and Fichte, whom he barely mentions in this connexion. To Schopenhauer and Nietzsche he assigns a high position as writers, as masters of language and moulders of impressive thoughts. He values them for their literary excellence, but denies them philosophic depth. As far as Nietzsche is concerned, whom, by the way, he regards as too glittering, Einstein certainly experiences ethical objections against this prophet of the aristocratic cult whose views are so diametrically opposed to Einstein's own opinion of the relations between man and man.
Earlier when we were talking of classical poetry he had particularly emphasized Sophocles as one who was dear to him. And this name leads us to the innermost source of Einstein as a man. "I am not here to hate with you but to love with you," is the cry of Sophocles' Antigone, and this cry is the keynote of Einstein's emotional existence. I shall not give way to the temptation to follow those who in the turmoil of the present day refer to Einstein as a political figure. That would lead to a description of policy and party arguments that lie beyond the scope of this book; so much the less am I inclined to do so as Einstein's convictions may be expressed very clearly without reference to schematic terms of a very elastic nature. An individuality such as his cannot be compressed into a party programme. And if anyone should insist on placing him among the radicals or on assigning him far to the left, I should suggest that it would be better to choose, instead of the classification right and left, that of above and below. I look up towards his idealism, whose altitude may perhaps be reached one day by the raising of our ethical standards. But not by means of paragraphs of laws. I have seldom heard him talk of such schematic recipes, but so much the more have I noted utterances which bore witness to a very intense and ever-present sympathy with every human creature. His programme, which is written not in ink but in heart's-blood, proclaims in the simplest manner the categorical imperative: Fulfil your duty to your fellow-being: offer help to every one: ward off every material oppression. "Well, then, he is a socialist," so the cry runs. If it is your pleasure to call him so, he will not deny you it. But to me this term seems to denote too narrow limits for him. I see no contradiction in applying the term, but there is no perfect congruence. If one word is necessary, I should be rather more inclined to say that he is in the widest sense a democrat of liberal trend.
For him the State is not its own aim, nor does he imagine himself to be the possessor of a panacea. "The attitude of the individual to socialism," he said, "is uncertain owing to the fact that we can never ascertain clearly how much of the iron compulsion and blind working of our economic system may be overcome by appropriate institutions." And I should like to add that such institutions would scarcely have a permanent result, but that more may be expected from the ethical example of those who have the power of renunciation. Whoever realizes the motto of Antigone, "I am here to love with you," brings us nearer the goal. All in all, our longing continually flees from the confusion of political considerations to simple morality. For Einstein this is the primary element, that which is directly evident and not open to misrepresentation. It includes sympathy, and, what is more important, joy in conjunction with others. "The best that life has to offer," he once exclaimed, "is a face glowing with happiness!"
This look is expressed on his own face when he discusses his ideals, above all the internationality of all intellectual workers and the realization of eternal peace among the nations. To him pacifism is a matter of mind as well as of heart, and he is of the opinion that the course of history so far is but the prelude to its realization. The past, with its bloodstained fingers that reach into the present, does not discourage him He points to the endless city wars of the Middle Ages in Italy, which had finally to cease in answer to the increasing feeling of solidarity. So he believes in the victory of peace, which the unified consciousness of all humanity will one day win over the demonic powers of tyranny and conquest.
The pacifistic goal seems to him to be attainable without the peculiarities of the various States being destroyed. National characteristics arising from tradition and hereditary influences do not signify in his eyes a contradiction to the internationalism that embraces the common intellectual factors of civilized peoples. Thus the desire for the preservation and care of particularities directs him to the secondary goal of Zionism. His blood asserts itself when he supports the foundation of a State in Palestine, which seems to him to be the only means of preserving the national individuality of his race without the freedom of the individual being affected.
We had left Art to talk of the State, and then returned to the former theme to touch lightly on the pictorial arts. Painting was allowed to pass with merely a fleeting remark. It plays no considerable part in Einstein's existence, and he would not suffer great grief if it were to vanish from the plane of culture, a consummation to which definite signs seems to point. I have described these signs in other writings (as in Kunst in 1000 Jahren), and maintain the point of view that the latest branches of painting as represented by expressionism and cubistic futurism denote, in essence, the last convulsions of a dying surface art. And even the chief representatives of former flourishing periods are beginning to fade away, and Einstein will not be the only one who will relegate this art, as compared with music, to a lower plane among the inspired arts that bring joy to humanity. He is only more frank than others when he freely confesses that he cannot convince himself that a life without the joys of pictorial art would be hopelessly impoverished. But he bows his head to sculpture, and, for him, architecture is a goddess. It is again his deeply rooted piety that asserts itself when memory recalls to him the Gothic dome with its pinnacles striving towards heaven. Goethe and Schlegel have called architecture "frozen music," and this picture is present in his mind when he sees Gothic architecture as frozen music of Bach. It is open to anyone to analyse this specific impression in another way by seeking the fundamental elements, in which the essence of the art is to provide support for a weighty structure and to overcome gravitation. For a spirit that works with mechanics and that feels within itself the pressures and tensions occurring in external nature, architecture is a kind of statics and dynamics transformed into a thing of beauty, a ravishing picture of his own science.
Einstein has told me many a story of his travels, and these reports were characterized by an absence of definite purpose. The conception of something worth seeing in the tourists' sense does not exist for him, and he does not set out in eager pursuit of those things that are marked with two asterisks in Baedeker. The intense romanticism of Swiss scenery, that lay within such easy reach for him, has never enticed him into its magic circle, and he has nothing to do with the abysmal terrors of glaciers and the world of snow-peaks. His enthusiasm for landscape beauty conforms with the behaviour of the barometer: the greater the altitude, the lower the mercury. In simple contact with Nature he prefers the lesser mountains, the seashore, and extensive plains, whereas brilliant panoramic contours like those of the Vierwaldstetter See do not rouse him into ecstasy. It is unnecessary to remark that he does not arrange his living on the standard of the Grand Palace Hotels en route. It is nearer the truth to picture him as a vagrant who tramps along without a sense of time and without a goal, in the fairy atmosphere of a joyous wanderer who has unconsciously adopted the old rule of Philander: Walk with a steady step: make your burden small: start early in the morn, and leave home all care!
Am I to record the list of pleasures and hobbies that are foreign to him? The list would be very long, and I should arrive at my goal more quickly by setting his sporting tendencies equal to zero. I once suspected him of being given to aquatic sport, as I learned that he had taken part in several yachting excursions. But I was mistaken. He sails in the same way as he walks on his tours, without a set purpose, dreaming, and uninterested in what is regarded by members of sailing clubs as a "feat." In the negative list of his games we see even chess, that usually exerts a strong attraction on natures with a mathematical tendency. The particular types of combination offered by this game have never tempted him, and the world of chess has remained terra incognita for him. He is just as little interested in every kind of collection, even that of books. I have seldom or never met a savant who attaches so little value to the personal possession of numerous and valuable books. This statement may be extended as far as saying that he experiences no pleasure at all in possession as such: he says so himself, and his whole manner of life proves it. There seems to me to be an element of resignation in his amiable hedonism, a kind of monkish asceticism. He never rids himself of the feeling that he is only paying a visit in this world.
I do not know whether Einstein considers that his life-work can be completed within the span of this visit. At any rate he makes no attempt to extract more out of the day by following a rigid programme of work than the day voluntarily offers. He does not compel himself to cover a definitely circumscribed piece of ground with chronological exactitude. There are brain-workers, especially artists, who actually never shake off the fetters of the twenty-four hours day of work inasmuch as they spin on the threads of daily effort into the nightly fabric of dreams. Einstein can make a pause, interrupt his work, or divert himself into side-channels at leisure and according to the demands of the hour, but dreams offer him no inspiration and do not waylay him with problems.
On the other hand, however, he is waylaid so much the more during the day by things and persons that make an assault on him. This starts as soon as the first post arrives, to see through which requires a special bureau. In addition to the communications of a professional or official nature there appear innumerable letters from everywhere and anywhere asking him to grant a little of his time. Whatever each individual writer has thought about the principle of relativity, all his thoughts and doubts, additions, and, above all, that which he has not been able to understand, all this is to be answered by Einstein. Has he, the child of fame, even a quarter of an hour for himself? There they wait in the hall, the painter, the photographer, the sculptor, and the interviewer; with whatever powers of persuasion and argumentative subtlety his attentive wife may seek to defend his hours of rest, some of these visitors will yet succeed in gaining the upper hand, and will produce something in oil-colours, in plaster of Paris, in black and white, in water-colours, or in print. Fame, too, demands her sacrifices, and if we talk of a hunt after fame, then Einstein is certainly not the hunter, but the hunted.
He sighs under the burden of his correspondence, not only as the recipient, but also with the sender, whose letter has to remain unanswered. Yet he is never roused to anger by the intruder on his time. If this were not so, the aphorism of Cyrus that patience is the panacea of all ills would not hold for him, and how would I myself otherwise have dared to claim so many hours of him? A sense of guilt falls on me!
But even Einstein's patience can come to an end, and this is at the point where "society" begins: I mean the congregation of persons in a salon, society entertainments to which one is invited to be seen, and so that one may claim to have been there. A solemn representation in which he is to be made the cynosure of all eyes is a torture to him. If in a very exceptional case he is compelled to participate in such a gathering, the joy of his hosts will not be entirely unmixed, for it does not require a thought-reader to recognize the longing for solitude imprinted on his countenance: "Could I but escape!"
So much the happier does he feel himself in the narrow circle of his friends, who offer what means to him much more than admiration, namely, affection, and an appreciation of his human self. He is what one wishes him to be. He is happy when he can forget the doctor profundus, and can yield himself up to the atmosphere of stimulating and unconstrained converse. He is a master in the art of listening, and is not averse to contradiction; when possible, he even emphasizes the arguments of his opponent. Audiatur et altera pars! This is a further manifestation of his altruistic personality, which rejoices when he extracts the true kernel from the husk of the opposing opinion. Here he also displays a characteristic which one does not usually expect to find among abstract thinkers, a sense of humour that runs through the whole gamut from a gentle smile to hearty laughter, and that is the happy source of many a striking sally. It may happen that the subject of conversation excites his anger, especially in political debates when he calls to mind militaristic or feudal misgovernment. He then becomes roused, and, as a cynical philosopher, sarcastically attacks personalities and points out the primary source of perennial hate, immediately afterwards soaring up to happy speculations of the future.
It is a matter for regret that the subjects that he has discoursed on lightly have not been fixed phonographically. Such records would form an interesting supplement to the conversations outlined in this book. It would never occur to him to set down in permanent literary form the inspiration of the moment. What he writes emanates from other regions, and is, to use his own expression, a precipitate of "thick ink." This is obvious, for what he has to proclaim as a scientist cannot be presented in a "thin" form. But many a so-called writer would have reason to congratulate himself, if so much thinly flowing matter occurred to him in writing as to Einstein in speaking.
The record of these conversations was begun in the summer of 1919, and completed in the autumn of 1920.
INDEX
Aristoteles, 41
Arrhenius, 144
Babinet, 25
Bach, 88, 235
Bacon, 46
Baer, K. E. von, 162
Bailhaud, 144
Beethoven, 99, 234, 235
Bell, Graham, 25, 111
Béranger, 84
Bergson, 91
Bernoulli, 48
Bernstein, 225
Bessel, 32
Bohr, Niels, 57, 210
Brahe, Tycho, 94
Bruno, Giordano, 141
Büchner, 225
Bulwer, 76
Bunsen, 164
Byron, 9
Cantor, 52, 203
Cavendish, 111
Ceulen, Ludolf van, 158
Condillac, 216
Copernicus, 6, 90
Cosmati, 48
Curie, Madame, 79, 231
Cuvier, 196
Darboux, 152
Dase, 158
Descartes, 47, 133, 162
Dingeldey, 190
Dostojewski, 185, 187
Dove, 21, 155
Duhem, 105, 106
Dühring, 54, 56
Eckermann, 50, 85
Edison, 140
Euclid, 180
Euler, 98
Euripides, 85
Faraday, 39, 61, 84
Fechner, 110, 182
Fermat, 97, 190
Fizeau, 113
Flammarion, 115
Franklin, 102
Fresnel, 45
Galilei, 6, 40, 150, 179, 181
Galle, 6
Galvani, 110
Gauss, 55, 185, 186
Goethe, 13, 23, 179, 197, 212, 236
240
Grillparzer, 95
Grossmann, 229
Hansen, 134
Hebbel, 77, 86
Hegel, 42
Heine, 49
Helmholtz, 25, 26, 53, 73
Heraclitus, 23
Herschel, 84
Hertz, 60
Hooke, 41
Horace, 3
Humboldt, 49
Hume, 161
Huyghens, 56, 109, 132
Jean Paul, 86, 223
Joule, 84
Jung Stilling, 84
Kant, 35, 121, 170, 177, 179, 237
Kepler, 6, 42, 84, 176, 177
Kirchhoff, 104-107, 148, 212
Kleist, 130
Kummer, 190
Lamarck, 197
Lange, 47
Laplace, 40, 45, 140, 165
Leibniz, 26, 128
Leonardo da Vinci, 11, 50-54
Leverrier, 6, 10
Liebig, 55
Lindemann, 158
Linné, 196
Lorentz, 57, 72
Lothar Meyer, 107
Lucretius, 210
Mach, 46, 77, 108, 149, 169
Mauthner, 95
Maxwell, 39, 60
Mayer, Robert, 25, 55, 56
Melanchthon, 82
Menander, 86
Mendelejew, 107
Mezzofanti, 63
Michelangelo, 49
Michelson and Morley, 112
Mill, 45
Mithridates, 63
Montaigne, 77
Mozart, 233
Newton, 2, 6, 8, 39, 40, 43, 96
Nietzsche, 63, 217, 237
Nollet, 103
Odilon, Helene, 135
Oersted, 109
Ostwald, 83, 231, 232
Ovid, 197
Pascal, 93, 98
Pasteur, 175
Perrin, 154
Pflüger, 35
Philander, 241
Picard, 144
Planck, 57, 59, 91, 230
Poincaré, 1, 7, 112, 116, 231
Pope, 54
Priestley, 111
Psellus, 156
Pyrrhon, 92
Pythagoras, 101, 179
Quetelet, 182
Regiomantus, 52
Reis, 25
Riemann, 186
Riggenbach, 25
Ruëss, 224
Rutherford, 36, 210
Schiller, 74, 94, 170
Schlegel, 240
Schlick, Moritz, 168
Schopenhauer, 41, 237
Schwann, 175
Shakespeare, 236
Siemens, 25, 27-30
Slade, 136
Sophocles, 238
Spinoza, 84, 162
Stephenson, 25
Terence, 191
Thomas Aquinas, 165
Torricelli, 166
Vaihinger, 43, 169
Vitruvius, 101
Volta, 110, 111
Voltaire, 47, 27
Wagner, 234
Weber, 182
Weierstrass, 152
Weyl, 34
Whewell, 45
Wien, 173
Zelter, 84
Zöllner, 137