University study was only touched on lightly during this talk. It has become known that Einstein is a very strong supporter of the principle of free learning, and that he would prefer to dispense entirely with the regular documents of admission which qualify holders to attend lecture courses. This is to be interpreted as meaning that as soon as anyone desirous of furthering his studies has demonstrated his fitness to follow the lecturer's reasoning by showing his ability in class exercises or in the laboratory, he should be admitted immediately. Einstein would not demand the usual certificate of "general education," but only of fitness for the special subject, particularly as, in his own experience, he has frequently found the cleverest people and those with the most definite aims to be prone to one-sidedness. According to this, even the intermediate schools should be authorized to bestow a certificate of fitness to enter on a course in a single definite subject as soon as the pupil has proved himself to have the necessary ability. If he earlier spoke in favour of abolishing the matriculation examination, this is only an indication of his effort to burst open the portals of higher education for every one. Nevertheless, I remarked that, in the course of university work itself, he is not in favour of giving up all regulation concerning the ability of the student—at least, not in the case of those who intend to devote themselves to instruction later. He does not desire an intermediate examination (in the nature of the tentamen physicum of doctors), but he considers it profitable for the future schoolmaster to have an opportunity early in his course to prove his fitness for teaching. In this matter, too, Einstein reveals his affectionate interest in the younger generation, whose development is threatened by nothing so much as by incapable teachers: the sum of these considerations is that the pupil is examined as little as possible, but the teacher so much the more closely. A candidate for the teaching profession, who in the early stages of his academic career fails to show his fitness, his individual facultas docendi, should be removed from the university.
There can be no doubt but that Einstein has a claim to be heard as an authority on these questions. There are few in the realm of the learned in whose faces it is so clearly manifest that they are called to excite a desire for knowledge by means of the living word, and to satisfy this desire. If great audiences assemble around him, if so many foreign academies open their arms to him to make him their own, these are not only signs of a magnetic influence that emanates from the famous discoverer, but they are indications that he is far famed as a teacher with a captivating personality. Let us consider what this signifies in his profession. Philosophers, historians, lawyers, doctors, and theologians have at their disposal innumerable words which they merely need to pronounce to get into immediate contact with their audiences. In Einstein's profession, theoretical physics, man disappears; it leaves no scope for the play of emotion; its implement mathematics—and what an instrument it is!—bristles with formal difficulties, which can be overcome only by means of symbols and by using a language which has no means of displaying eloquence, being devoid of expression, emotion, and regular periods. Yet here we have a physicist, a mathematician, whose first word throws a charm over a great crowd of people, and who extracts from their minds, so to speak, what, in reality, he alone works out before them. He does not adhere closely to written pages, nor to a scheme which has been prepared beforehand in all its details; he develops his subject freely, without the slightest attempt at rhetoric, but with an effect which comes of itself when the audience feels itself swept along by the current. He does not need to deliver his words passionately, as his passion for teaching is so manifest. Even in regions of thought in which usually only formulæ, like glaciers, give an indication of the height, he discovers similes and illustrations with a human appeal, by the aid of which he helps many a one to conquer the mountain sickness of mathematics. His lectures betray two factors that are rarely found present in investigators of abstract subjects; they are temperament and geniality. He never talks as if in a monologue or as if addressing empty space. He always speaks like one who is weaving threads of some idea, and these become spun out in a fascinating way that robs the audience of the sense of time. We all know that no iron curtain marks the close of Einstein's lecture; anyone who is tormented by some difficulty or doubt, or who desires illumination on some point, or has missed some part of the argument, is at liberty to question him. Moreover, Einstein stands firm through the storm of all questions. On the very day on which the above conversation took place he had come straight from a lecture on four-dimensional space, at the conclusion of which a tempest of questions had raged about him. He spoke of it not as of an ordeal that he had survived, but as of a refreshing shower. And such delights abound in his teaching career.
It was the last lecture before his departure for Leyden (in May 1920), where the famous faculty of science, under the auspices of the great physicist Lorentz, had invited him to accept an honorary professorship. This was not the first invitation of this kind, and will not be the last, for distinctions are being showered on him from all parts of the world. It is true that the universities who confer a degree on him honoris causa are conferring a distinction on themselves, but Einstein frankly acknowledges the value of these honours, which he regards as referring only to the question in hand, and not the person. It gives him pleasure on account of the principle involved being recognized, and he regards himself essentially only as one whom fate has ordained as the personal exponent of these principles.
What this life of hustle and bustle about a scientist signifies is perhaps more apparent to me, who have a modest share in these conversations, than to Einstein himself, for I am an old man who—unfortunately—have to think back a long way to my student days, and can set up comparisons which are out of reach of Einstein. Formerly, many years ago, but in my own time, there was an auditorium maximum which only one man could manage to fill with an audience, namely, Eugen Dühring, the noted scholar, who was doomed to remain a lecturer inasmuch as he went under in his quarrels with confrères of a higher rank. But before he made his onslaught against Helmholtz, he was regarded as a man of unrivalled magnetic power, for his philosophical and economical lectures gathered together over three hundred hearers, a record number in those times. Nowadays, in the case of Einstein, four times this number has been surpassed, a fact which has brought into circulation the playful saying: One can never miss his auditorium; whither all are hastening, that is the goal! To make just comparisons, we must take account of the faithfulness of the assembled crowd, as well as its number. Many an eminent scholar has in earlier times had reason to declare, like Faust: "I had the power to attract you, yet had no power to hold you." Helmholtz began regularly every term with a crowded lecture-hall, but in a short time he found himself deserted, and he himself was well aware that no magnetic teaching influence emanated from him. There is yet another case in university history of a brilliant personality who, from similar flights of ecstasy, was doomed to disappointment. I must mention his name, which, in this connexion, will probably cause great surprise, namely, Schiller! He had fixed his first lecture in history at Jena, to which he was appointed, and had prepared for an audience of about a hundred students. But crowd upon crowd hustled along, and Schiller, who saw the oncoming stream from his window, was overcome with the impression that there was no end to it. The whole street took alarm, for at first it was imagined that a fire had broken out, and at the palace the watch was called out—yet, a little later in the course, there was a depressing ebb of the tide, after the first curiosity had been appeased; the audience gradually vanished into thin air, a proof of the fact that the nimbus of a name does not suffice to maintain the interest between the lecturer's desk and the audience.
I mentioned this example at the time when Einstein's gift for teaching had gradually increased the number of his hearers to the record figure of 1200, yet I did not on this occasion detect any inordinate joy in him about his success. I gained the impression that he had strained his voice in the vast hall. His mood betrayed in consequence a slight undercurrent of irritation. In an access of scepticism he murmured the words, "A mere matter of fashion." I cannot imagine that he was entirely in earnest. It goes without saying that I protested against the expression. But, even if there were a particle of truth in it, we might well be pleased to find such a fashion in intellectual matters, one that persists so long and promises to last. The world would recover its normal healthy state if fashions of this kind were to come into full swing. It is, of course, easy to understand on psychological grounds that Einstein himself takes up a sort of defensive position against his own renown, and that he occasionally tries to attack it by means of sarcasm, seeing that he cannot find serious arguments to oppose it.
Whether Einstein's ideas and proposals concerning educational reform will be capable of realization throughout is a question that time alone can answer. We must make it clear to ourselves that, if carried out along free-thinking lines, they will demand certain sacrifices, and it depends on the apportionment of these sacrifices as to what the next, or the following, generation will have to exhibit in the way of mental training.
An appreciable restriction will have to be imposed on the time given to languages. It is a matter of deciding how far this will affect the foundations that, under the collective term humaniora, have supported the whole system of classical schools for centuries. The fundamental ideas of reform, which, owing to the redivision of school-hours and the economy of work, no longer claim precedence for languages, indicate that not much will be left of the original Latin and Greek basis.
We have noticed above that Einstein, although he does not, in principle, oppose the old classicism, no longer expects much good of it. But nowadays the state of affairs is such that it is hardly a question of supporting or opposing its retention in fragmentary form. Whoever does not support it with all his power strengthens indirectly the mighty chorus of those who are radically antagonistic to it. And it is a remarkable fact that this chorus includes many would-be authorities on languages who have influence among us because they are champions of the cause of retaining languages.
They do not wish to rescue languages as such, but only the German tongue; they point to the humaniora of classical schools, or to Humanisterei, as they call it, as the enemy and corrupter of their language. In what sense they mean this is obvious from their articles of faith, of which I should like to cite a few in the original words of one of their party-leaders:
"Up to the time of the hazardous enterprise of Thomasius (who first announced lectures in the German language in 1687) German scholars as a body were the worst enemies of their own tongue.—Luther did not take his models for writing German from the humanistic mimics who aped the old Latins. In the case of many, including Lessing and Goethe, we observe them making a definite attempt to shake themselves free from the chaos of humanistic influences in Germany—The inheritance of pseudo-learned concoctions of words stretches back to pretentious humanism as do most of essential vices of learned styles.—The far-reaching and lasting corruption of the German language by this poisonous Latin has its beginnings in the humanism of the sixteenth century."
And, quite logically, these heralds extend their attacks along the whole academic front. For, according to their point of view, the whole army of professors is deeply immersed in the language slime of the traditional humanism of the Greeks and Latins. "The whole language evil of our times," so these leaders say, "is at bottom due to scientists, who, in the opinionated guise of a language caste, and without enriching our conceptions in the slightest, seek by tinkling empty words to give us the illusion of a new and particularly mysterious occult science, an impression which is unfortunately often produced on ignorant minds.... However many muddy outlets official institutions and language associations may purge and block up, ditch-water from ever new quagmires and drains pours unceasingly into the stately stream of our language."
Thus the attack on the Latin and Greek language foundation in schools identifies itself with the struggle against the academic world as a whole, and a scholar who does defend the classical system of education with all his might finds himself unconsciously drifting into the ranks of the brotherhood which in the last instance is seeking his own extermination.
This danger must not be under-estimated. It is just this peril, so threatening to our civilization, that moves me to show my colours frankly here. I am not a supporter of bookworm drudgery in schools, but I feel myself impelled to use every effort in speech and writing to combat the anti-humanists whose password, "For our language," at root signifies "Enemies of Science!"
We must put no weapons into their hands, and the only means to avoid this is, in my opinion, to state our creed emphatically and openly after the manner of almost all our classical writers.
This creed, both as regards language and substance, is to be understood as being based on the efficacy of the old classical languages. It is the luminous centre of the life and work of the men who caused Bulwer to proclaim our country the country of poets and thinkers. The superabundance of these is so excessive that it is scarcely fair to mention only a few names such as Goethe, Lessing, Schiller, Wieland, Kant, and Schopenhauer. Our literature would be of a provincial standard and not a world possession if this creed had not asserted its sway at all times.
If the question is raised as to where our youth is to find time for learning ancient languages under the present conditions of crowded subjects, the answer is to be furnished by improved methods of instruction. My personal point of view is that even the older methods were not so bad. Goethe found himself in no wise embarrassed through lack of time in acquiring all sorts of knowledge and mental equipment, although even as a boy of eight years he could write in Latin in a way which, compared with the bungling efforts of the modern sixth-form boy, seems Ciceronian. Montaigne could express himself earlier in Latin than in French, and if he had not had this "Latin poison" injected into his blood he would never have become Montaigne.
It seems to me by no means impossible that the cultured world will one day in the distant future return to the once self-evident view of classical languages, and indeed just for reasons of economy of time, unless the universal language so ardently desired by Hebbel—not to be confused with the artificial patchwork called Esperanto—should become a reality. But even this language, at present Utopian, but one which will help to link together the nations, will disclose the model of the ancient languages in its structure. Scientific language of the present day shows where the route lies; and this route will be made passable in spite of all the efforts of Teutonic language saints and assassins of humanism to block it.
The working out of ideas by research scientists leads to enrichment of language. And since, as is quite natural, they draw copiously on antique forms of expression, they are really the trustees of an instruction that makes these expressions intelligible not merely as components of an artificial language like Volapük but as organic growths. That is how they proceed when they carry on their research, or describe it and lecture on their own subject. But if they are to decide how the school is to map out its course in actual practice, the problem of time again becomes their chief consideration—that is, they feel in duty bound to give preference to what is most important. Hence there results the wish to reduce the hours apportioned to the language subjects as much as possible.
On this matter we have a detailed essay by the distinguished Ernst Mach mentioned earlier, who exposes the actual dilemma with the greatest clearness. He treats this exceedingly important question in all its phases, and arrives at almost the same conclusion as Einstein. At the outset he certainly chants a Latin psalm almost in the manner of Schopenhauer. Its lower tones represent an elegy lamenting that Latin is no longer the universal language among educated people, as it was from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. Its fitness for this purpose is quite indisputable, for it can be adapted to express every conception however modern or subtle it may be.
What a profusion of new conceptions was introduced into science by Sir Isaac Newton, to all of which he succeeded in giving correct and precise Latin names! The natural inference suggests itself to us that young people should learn the ancient classical tongues—and yet a different result is coming about; the modern child is to be content with understanding words with a world-wide currency, without knowing their philological origin.
It is not necessary to be a schoolmaster to feel the inadequacy of this proceeding. It is true that without knowing Arabic we can grasp the sense and meaning of the word "Algebra," and in the same way we can extract the essence of a number of Greek and Latin expressions without digging at their etymological roots. But these expressions are to be counted in hundreds and thousands, and are increasing daily, so that we are put before the question whether, merely from the point of view of time, it is practicable to learn them as individual foreign terms or as natural products of a root language with which we have once and for all become familiar.
It is scarcely necessary for me to point out that Einstein himself is not sparing in the use of these technical expressions, even when he is using popular language. He assumes or introduces terms of which the following are a few examples: continuum, co-ordinate system, dimensional, electrodynamics, kinetic theory, transformation, covariant, heuristic, parabola, translation, principle of equivalence, and he is quite justified in assuming that every one is fully acquainted with such generally accepted expressions as: gravitation, spectral analysis, ballistic, phoronomy, infinitesimal, diagonal, component, periphery, hydrostatics, centrifugal, and numberless others which are diffused through educated popular language in all directions. Taken all together these represent a foreign realm in which the entrant can always succeed in orientating himself when he receives explanations, examples, or translations, whereas with a little preliminary knowledge of the ancient languages he immediately feels himself at home with them; in this we have not even taken into consideration the general cultural value of this training in view of the access it gives to the old literature and to Hellenic culture.
Perhaps I am going too far in adopting the attitude of a laudator temporis acti towards Einstein's very advanced opinion. We are here dealing with a question in which nothing can be proved, and in which everything depends on disposition and personal experiences. In my own case this experience includes the fact that at a very early age, in spite of the very discouraging school methods, I enjoyed the study of Latin and Greek, and that I learned Horatian odes by heart, not because I had to, but because they appealed to me, and finally that Homer opened up a new world to me. When Einstein expresses his abhorrence of drill, I agree with him; but these languages need not be taught as if we are on parade. We see thus that it is a question of method and not of the subject involved. Einstein gives the subject its due by recommending a double series of classes. He allows the paths to diverge, giving his special blessing to the group along the one without setting up obstacles to prevent the other pilgrims from attaining happiness in their own way.
We spoke of higher education for women, and Einstein expressed his views which, as was to be expected, were tolerant, and yet did not suggest those of a champion of the cause. It was impossible to overlook the fact that in spite of his approval he had certain reservations of a theoretical nature.
"As in all other directions," he said, "so in that of science the way should be made easy for women. Yet it must not be taken amiss if I regard the possible results with a certain amount of scepticism. I am referring to certain obstacles in woman's organization which we must regard as given by Nature, and which forbid us from applying the same standard of expectation to women as to men."
"You believe, then, Professor, that high achievements cannot be accomplished by women? To keep our attention on science, can one not quote Madame Curie as a proof to the contrary?"
"Surely only as one proof of brilliant exceptions, more of which may occur without refuting the statute of sexual organization."
"Perhaps this will be possible after all if a sufficient time for development be allowed. There may be much fewer geniuses among the other sex, but there has certainly been a concentration of talent. Or, in other words, totally ignorant women have become much rarer. You, Professor, are fortunate in not being in a position to compare young women of to-day with those of forty or more years ago. This I can do, and just as once I found it natural that there should be swarms of little geese and peacocks, I never recover from my astonishment nowadays at the amount of knowledge acquired by young womanhood. It requires a considerable effort on my part very often to avoid being completely overshadowed by a partner at dinner. The more this stratum of talent increases, the more we have reason to expect a greater number of geniuses from them in the future."
"You are given to prognostication," said Einstein, "and calculate with probabilities which sometimes are lacking in foundation. Increased education and even an increase of talents are quantitative assumptions that make an inference regarding higher quality reaching to genius appear very bold."—A passing look of ominous portent flashed over his face, and I noticed that he was preparing to launch a sarcastic aphorism. So it was, for the next words were: "It is conceivable that Nature may have created a sex without brains!"
I grasped the sense of this grotesque remark, which was in no way to be taken literally. It was intended as an amusing exaggeration of what he had earlier called the reason for his failing expectation: the organic difference which, being rooted in the physical constitution, had somewhere to express itself on the mental plane, too. The soul of woman strong in impulse shows a refinement of feeling of which we men are not susceptible, whereas the greatest achievements of reason probably depend on a preponderance of brain substance. It is this plus beyond the normal amount that gives promise of great discoveries, inventions, and creations. We can just as little imagine a female Galilei, Kepler, and Descartes, as a female Michelangelo or Sebastian Bach. But when we think of these extreme cases, let us also recall the balance on the other side: although a woman could not create the differential calculus, it was she that created Leibniz; similarly she produced Kant if not the Critique of Pure Reason. Woman, as the author of all great minds, has at least a right of access to all means of education and to all advancement that is proffered by universities. And in this connexion Einstein expressed his wish clearly enough.
One of the most discussed themes in matters touching school education is at the present time: "the selection of gifted pupils." It has developed into a principle that is generally recognized by the great majority, the only point of disagreement being in respect to the number that is to be selected.
The idea running through it is that derived from Darwin's theory of selection: man completes the method of selection practised by Nature. He sifts and chooses, and allows those that are more talented to come to the fore more rapidly and more decidedly; he favours their advancement and makes easy their ascent.
This principle has really always been in existence. It started with the distribution of prizes in ancient Olympia and reaches to the present-day examinations that are clearly intended as a means of selecting talents. A greater discrimination based on a systematic search for talents was reserved for our own day.
It was scarcely a matter of doubt to me what attitude Einstein would take up towards this matter. I had already heard him say hard words about the system of examinations, and knew his leaning towards allowing each mind to develop its power freely and naturally.
In effect, Einstein declared to me that he would hear nothing of a breeding of talents in a sort of sporting way. The dangers of the methods of sport would creep in and lead to results that had only the appearance of truth. From the results so far obtained it was impossible to come to a final decision about it. Yet it was conceivable that a selective process conducted along reasonable lines would in general prove of advantage in education, particularly in the respect that many a talent that would ordinarily become stunted owing to its being kept in darkness would now have an opportunity of coming to light.
This resolved itself into a talk bearing on many questions, and of which I should like to state the main issue here. It was specially intended to make clear the gambling method that Einstein repudiates, and the danger of which seems still more threatening to me than to him.
If certain pedagogues, whose creed is force, were to have their way, the "most gifted" pupils would be able, or would be compelled, to rush through school at hurricane speed, and, at an age at which their fellows were still spending weary hours at their desks, they would have to clamber to the topmost branches of the academic tree. All things are possible, and history even furnishes cases of such forced marches. Luther's friend Melanchthon qualified at the age of thirteen to enter the University of Heidelberg, and at the age of seventeen he became a professor at Tübingen, where he gave lectures on the most difficult problems of philosophy, as well on the Roman and Greek writers of classical antiquity. This single instance need only be generalized, and we have the new ideal rising up before our astonished gaze: a race of professorial striplings whose upper lips are scarcely darkened with the down of youth! It is a mere matter of making an early discovery of the most gifted, and then raising the scaffolding up which the precocious know-alls can climb as easily as possible.
[Interposed query: Where are these discoverers of talent, and how do they prove their own talent? There was a good opportunity for them in a case which I must here mention. Einstein told me in another connexion that, as early as 1907, that is, when he was still very young in years, he had not only succeeded in successfully representing the Principle of Equivalence, one of the main supports of the General Principle of Relativity, but had even published it; yet it made not the slightest impression on the learned world. No one suspected the far-reaching consequences, and no one pointed out this flaming up of a new talent of the highest order. And just as this was able to remain concealed from the learned Areopagus of the world at that time, so a similar lack of understanding may easily be possible on a smaller scale at school. We know actually that among the recognized great men of science, there were many who did only moderately well at school; as, for example, Humphry Davy, Robert Mayer, Justus Liebig, and many others. Wilhelm Ostwald goes so far as to affirm: "Boys ordained to be discoverers later in life have, almost without exception, been bad at school! It is just the most gifted young people who have resisted most strongly the form of intellectual development prescribed by the school! Schools never cease to show themselves to be the bitter, unrelenting enemies of genius!"—in spite of all efforts at selection which have always been in vogue in the guise of advancement into higher forms.]
But the new mode of selection is intended to prevent mistakes and oversights. Is this possible? Do not the traces of previous attempts inspire distrust? There was once a very ideal selection that had to stand the test of one of the most eminent bodies in existence, the French Academy. Its duty was to discover geniuses on an incomparably higher plane. It, however, repudiated or overlooked: Molière, Descartes, Pascal, Diderot, the two Rousseaus, Beaumarchais, Balzac, Béranger, the Goncourts, Daudet, Emile Zola, and many other extremely gifted people, whom it should really have been able to find.
The only true, and at the same time necessary as well as sufficient, breeding is carried out by Nature herself in conjunction with social conventions, which promise the more success the less they assume the character of incubators and breeding establishments. If you wish to apply tests to discover pupils of genius in any class, examine as much as you like, excite interest and ambition, distribute prizes even, but not for the purpose of separating at short intervals the shrewd and needle-witted heads from the rest; and do not lose sight of the fact that among those who appear as the sheep as a result of these systematized tests to discover ingenuity there are many who, ten or twenty years later, will take up their positions as men of eminent talent.
There is no essential difference between the forced promotion of such pupils and the breeding of super-men according to Nietzsche's recipe as exemplified by his Zarathustra.
Assuming that super-men are justified in existing at all, they will come about of themselves, but cannot simply be manufactured. Workmen, taken as a class, represent super-men more definitely than an individual such as Napoleon or Cæsar Borgia. So the "super-scholar" exists perhaps already to-day, not as an individual phenomenon, but as a whole, representing his class. Whoever has had experience in these things will know that nowadays there are difficult subjects in which it is possible to apply to pupils of fifteen years of age tests that are far above the plane of comprehension of pupils of the same age in former times, provided that the average is considered, that no accidental or artificial separation has occurred, that no pretentiously witty questions have had to be answered, and that there has been no systematic and inquisitive search for talent.
Let us rest satisfied if we find that the sum-total of talent is continually on the increase. On the other hand, it is by no means proved that we are doing civilization a service by persisting in the impossible project of abolishing from the world the struggle for existence prescribed by Nature. It is an elementary fact, and one that is easy to understand, that many talents perish unnoticed. On the other hand, observe the long list of eminent men who fought their way upwards out of the lowest stages of existence only to recognize that the difficulties that have been overcome are mostly necessary accompaniments of talent, that is, that Nature's way of selection is to oppose obstacles and raise difficulties in order to test their powers. In the case of the poor lens-grinder Spinoza and many others ranging to Béranger, who was a waiter, what a chain of desperate experiences, yet what triumphs! Herschel, the astronomer, was too poor to buy a refracting telescope, and it was just this dispensation of poverty that made him succeed in constructing a reflecting type composed of a mirror. Faraday, the son of a blacksmith without means, made his way for years as a bookbinder's apprentice. Joule, one of the founders of the mechanical theory of heat, started as a beer-brewer. Kepler, the discoverer of the planetary laws, was descended from a poverty-stricken innkeeper. Of the members in Goethe's circle, Jung-Stilling, of whom Nietzsche was so fond, was a tailor's apprentice; Eckermann, Goethe's intimate associate, was a swine-herd, and Zelter was a mason. We could add many recent names to this list, and very many more if we continue the line backwards to Euripides, whose father was a publican and whose mother was a vendor of vegetables. This might serve as a basis for many reflections about the "upward course of the talented," and about its less favourable reverse side. For one might put the apparently paradoxical question whether a soaring career for many or all talents is a necessity for our civilization, or whether it would not be better to have a substratum interspersed with talent, to cultivate a mossy undergrowth which is to serve as nourishment for the blooming plants of the upper layer.
Maximum is not equivalent to optimum, and we learned elsewhere that Einstein is far removed from identifying them. In the previous case it was a question of the problem of population; and in the course of the discussion he mentioned that we are subject to an old error of calculation when we regard it as a desirable aim to have a maximum number of human beings on the earth. It seems, indeed, that this false conclusion is already in process of being corrected. A beginning is being made with new and very active organizations and unions whose programme is to reduce the number so that an optimum may be attainable by those left.
If we extend this line of reasoning still further, we arrive at the depressing question whether too much might not be done for talent, not only as regards breeding it, but also in favouring the greatest number. It is quite possible that in doing so, we might overlook, or take insufficient account of the harm that might be done to the lower stratum, in that we should be depriving it of forces which, according to the economy of Nature, should remain and act in concealment.
This fear, as here expressed, is not shared by Einstein. However brusquely he repudiates breeding, he speaks in favour of smoothing the way for talent. "I believe," he said, "that a sensible fostering of gifts is of advantage to humanity generally and prevents injustice being done to the individual. In great cities which give such lavish opportunities of education, this injustice manifests itself less often; but it occurs so much the more in rural districts, where there are certainly many cases of gifted youths who, if recognized as such at the right age, would attain to an important position, but who, together with their gifts, become stunted, nay, go to ruin, if the principle of selection does not penetrate to their circle."
This brings us to the most difficult and most dangerous point. The spectre of responsibility is rapping at the portals of society, and is reminding us insistently that it is our duty to see that no injustice be done to any talent that may be among us. And this duty is but little removed from the demand that it should be disburdened of the worries of daily life, for, so the moral argument runs, talent will ripen the more surely the less it has to combat these ceaseless disturbances of ordinary life.
But this thesis, so evident on moral grounds, will never be proved empirically. On the contrary, we have good reason to suppose that necessity, the mother of invention on the broader scale, will often in the case of the individual talent prove to be the mother of its best results. Goethe required for his development an unchallenged life of ease, whereas Schiller, who never emerged from his life of misery, and who, up to the time when he wrote Don Carlos, had not been able to earn sufficient with his pen to buy a writing-desk, required distress to make his genius burst into flower. Jean Paul recognized this blessing of gloomy circumstances when he glorified poverty in his novels. Hebbel followed him along this path by saying that it is more fruitful to refuse the most talented person the necessities of life than to grant them to the least gifted. For among a hundred who have been chosen by the method of sifting, there will be only one on the average who will receive the certificate of excellence in the test of future generations, for the latter use entirely different methods of sifting from that practised by a committee of examiners who expect ready answers to prepared questions.
This projects us on to the horns of a severe dilemma that scarcely allows of escape. The consciousness of duty towards the optimum expresses itself only in a maximum of assistance, and overhears the whispered objection of reason that Nature has also coarser means at her disposal to attain her ends; in her own cruelty of selection she often enough proves the truth of Menander's saying, which, freely translated, says: to be tormented is also part of man's education. The fact that Einstein—with certain reservations—favours the giving of help to the selected few, it is for me a proof, among many others, of his love towards his fellow-men, which fills his heart absolutely, all questions of relativity notwithstanding.
Relation of Discovery and Philosophy in History.—The Absolute and the Relative.—The Creative Act.—Value of Intuition.—Constructive Activity.—Invention.—The Artist as Discoverer.—Theory and Proof.—Classical Experiments.—Physics in Primitive Ages.—Experimentum Crucis.—Spectral Analysis and Periodic System.—The Rôle of Chance.—Disappointed Expectations.—The Michelson-Morley Experiment and the New Conception of Time.
NEXT time—so one of our talks ended—next time, as you insist on it, we shall talk of discovery in general. This, was a promise of special import for me, for it meant that I was to draw near to a fountain-head of instruction, and to have an opportunity of hearing the pronouncements of one whose authority could scarcely be transcended.
We are precluded from questioning Galilei personally about the foundations of Mechanics, or Columbus about the inner feelings of a navigator who discovers new lands, or Sebastian Bach about the merits of Counterpoint, but a great discoverer lives among our contemporaries who is to give us a clue to the nature of discovery. Was it not natural that I should feel the importance of his acceptance of my proposal?
Before meeting him again I was overwhelmed with ideas that arose in me at the slightest echo of the word "discovery" in my mind. Nothing, it seemed to me, could be higher: man's position in the sphere of creation and the sum of his knowledge can be deduced from the sum of his discoveries which find their climax in the conceptions civilization and philosophy, just as they are partly conditioned by the philosophy of the time. We might be tempted to ask: which of these two precedes, and which follows? And perhaps the ambiguous nature of this question would furnish us with the key to the answer. For, ultimately, these two elements cannot at all be resolved into the relationship of cause and effect, antecedent and consequent.
Neither is primary, and neither secondary: they are intimately interwoven with one another, and are only different aspects of one and the same process. At the root of this process is our axiomatic belief that the world can be comprehended, and the indomitable will of all thinking men, acting as an elementary instinct, to bring the perceptual events in the universe into harmony with the inner processes of thought. This impulse is eternal; it is only the form of these attempts to make the world fully intelligible that alters and is subject to the change of time. This form finds expression in the current philosophy which brings each discovery to fruition, just as philosophy bears in itself constituents of the ripe discovery.
It seemed to me that even at this stage of my reflections I was somewhere near interpreting Einstein's intellectual achievement. For his principle of relativity is tantamount to a regulative world-principle that has left a mighty mark in the thought of our times. We have lived to see the death of absolutism; the relativity of the constituents of political power, and their mutability according to view-point and current tendencies, become manifest to us with a clearness unapproached by any experience of earlier historical epochs. The world was far enough advanced in its views for a final achievement of thought which would demolish the absolute also from the mathematico-physical aspect. This is how Einstein's discovery appeared as inevitable.
Yet a shadow of doubt crossed my mind. Einstein's discoveries came to light in the year 1905—that is, at a time when hardly a cloud was visible to forewarn us of the storms which were to uproot absolutism in the world. But what if a different kind of necessity had imposed itself on world-history, and hence on the world-view? Nowadays we know from authentic accounts, which no one doubts, that all that we have experienced during the war and the revolution has hung upon the activities of one frail human being of quite insignificant exterior, a bureaucrat of the Wilhelm-Strasse, a choleric eccentric who succeeded in frustrating the Anglo-German alliance which was unceasingly being pressed upon us for six long years after the beginning of the century.
Amid the noisy progress of universal evolution the secret and insignificant nibbling of a mole cannot be regarded as of momentous importance for history, and yet if we eliminate it from the complete picture of events we find as a result that all our experiences have been inverted. Absolutism would not have been thrown overboard, but would probably have kept the helm with greater mastery than ever as the exponent of an Anglo-German hegemony of the world, and a political outlook fundamentally different in tendency would now have been prevailing on the earth.
But Einstein's Theory of Relativity would not have taken the slightest heed of this. It would have arisen independently of the current forms of political conceptions, simply because we had reached that point in our intellectual development and because Einstein was living and spinning his webs of thought. And the question whether his theory will also have crushed absolutism for the non-physicist cannot be answered.
It may indeed be doubted whether its time had already come. In the case of many important events in the history of thought their moment of birth can be fixed to within about ten years, as for example the Theory of Evolution, which had been conceived in several minds at the same time and had of necessity to come to life in one of them, even if it had failed in the case of the others. I venture to say that without Einstein, the Theory of Relativity in its widest sense, that is, including the new doctrine of gravitation, would perhaps have had to wait another two hundred years before being born.
This contradiction is cleared up if we use sufficiently great time intervals. History does not adapt itself to the time measures of politics and of journalism, and philosophies are not to be calculated in terms of days. The philosophy of Aristotle held sway right through the Middle Ages, and that of Epicurus will gain its full force only in the coming generation. But if we make our unit a hundred years the connexion between philosophies and great discoveries remains true.
Whoever undertakes to explore the necessity of this connexion cannot evade the fact that the lines of the result had been marked out in the region of pure thought, as can be proved, before even the great discovery or invention was able to present it in a fully intelligible form. Even the achievement of Copernicus would follow this general rule of development: it was the last consequence of the belief in the Sun Myth which had never been forsaken by man in spite of the violent efforts of the Church and of man himself to force the geocentric view. Copernicus concentrated what had survived of the wisdom of the earliest priests—which includes also the germ of our modern ideas of energy and electricity—of the teachings of Anaxagoras and the Eleatics which had remained latent in our consciousness: his discovery was the transformation of a myth into science. Mankind, whose wandering fancy first feels presentiments, then thinks and wishes to know, is a large edition of the individual thinker. The latter sees further only because he, so to speak, stands on the shoulders of a sum-total of beings with a world-view.
Let us turn our attention to an example from the most recent history of philosophy and discovery. The absolute continuity of events was one of the generally accepted canons of thought, and is even nowadays taught by serious philosophers as an incontrovertible element in our knowledge. The old quotation Natura non facit saltus, popularized by Linné, is one of the formulae of this apparently invincible truth. But deep down in the consciousness of man there has always been an opposition to it, and when the French philosopher Henri Bergson set out to break up this line of continuity by metaphysical means in ascribing to human knowledge an intermittent, cinematographic character, he was proclaiming in an audible and eloquent form only what had lain latent in a new but as yet incomplete philosophy. Bergson made no new "discovery," he felt his way intuitively into a new field of knowledge and recognized that the time was ripe for the real discovery. This was actually presented to us in our day by the eminent physicist Max Planck, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1919, in the form of his "Quantum Theory." This is not to be taken as meaning that a revolutionary philosophy and a triumph of scientific research now become coincident, but only that a discontinuous, intermittent sequence, an atomistic structure, was proved by means of the weapons of exact science, to be true of energies which, according to current belief, were expected to be radiated regularly and connectedly. This was probably not a case of the accidental coincidence of a new philosophical view with the results of reasoning from physical grounds, but a demand of time, exacting that the claims of a new principle of thought be recognized.
As above suggested, it is more difficult to find a link between Einstein's discoveries and antecedent presentiments of relativity. For a mere reference to the downfall of absolutism in the world of human events will not suffice. In the case of Einstein, we see such a tremendous rush of thought in one being that we almost feel compelled to recognize an analogy with the Quantum Theory and believe in a discontinuity in the course of intellectual history. Yet there are certainly threads that connect Einstein's achievement with a prophetic insight. In this case, however, we must spread out over centuries what in the case of other discoveries extends, in comparison, only over decades. That doubt of Faust, which troubles the spirit of every thinker: "whether in yonder spheres there is also an Above and a Below," and which goes back as far as Pyrrhon and Protagoras, is itself relativistic; it expresses doubt whether the co-ordinate system passing through our own lifes as centres is valid. It is ultimately a matter of point of view, and the mathematico-physical consequences of the endless series of questions, and the relation, which arises from the couple, Above-Below, probably leads to a new mode of comprehending the constitution of the world, for which Einstein's creative work found the adequate expression in abstract terms. And from this point onwards, in accordance with the principle of reciprocal action, a new stream of knowledge will pour itself into the hazy stretches of philosophy. A fundamental and radical reform of our philosophy seems inevitable, particularly with respect to our conceptions of Space and Time, perhaps, too, even with respect to Infinity and Causality. Much dross will have to be sifted out of our old categories of thought and out of our world wisdom, which once served as material for fine structures. What will the finer ones look like that are to take their places in obedience to the command of physics? Who would care to take it upon himself to form an estimate?
Much will be uprooted, and it is possible that even the defiant "ignorabimus," the antipole of the search for truth from Pyrrhon to Dubois, will again take up the cudgel. For in the face of despairing uncertainty there is the one certainty: what cannot be comprehended is being encircled more and more by the great discoverers! And even if the absolute point of convergence can never be reached, there is within our reach at least another point which is a haven of rest in the passing stream of philosophies, namely, a moral centre around which eddies of happiness circle. At the heart of this world-view there is the uplifting belief in an advance of knowledge in spite of all, and a belief in the vanishing of age-long problems and difficulties under the flood of discoveries. And even if afterwards and concurrently ever new problems and difficulties arise, these do not suppress our feeling of triumph. Every achievement in this field gives us a sense of enfranchisement from prejudices, not the least of which is narrowness of national outlook. Not only do discoverers construct bridges of thought that stretch to astronomical distances, but, what is more difficult, they build bridges for our feelings, that surmount political obstacles. Every thinking being who plays a part in the making of some great discovery and who, with deepened vision, bows before a new achievement of mind, gradually becomes a disciple of the religion of universal politics, the creed of which is faith in the brotherhood of thought. The nucleus of a philosophy that belongs to the future is the recognition that differing national view must be compounded into a unity, and that every great discovery means a step towards attaining this end.
Even if we accept Pascal's wonderful dictum that human knowledge is represented by a sphere which is continually growing and increasing its points of contact with the unknown, we must not interpret it as a sign of despair. It is not the enlargement of the unknown, but only that of knowledge that stirs our feelings with ethical forces. The positive calls up in us a living force by inspiring in us the feeling that the sphere of knowledge is destined to grow, and that there can be no higher duty for all the energies of mind than to obey the call for combined action towards this growth which will bring the world into harmony.
Full of such reflections I entered the home of the great discoverer, whose activities unceasingly hovered before my vision as ideal examples of creative effort. I discovered him, as almost always, seated before loose sheets of paper which his hand had covered with mathematical symbols, with hieroglyphics of that universal language in which, according to Galilei, the great book of Nature is written.
What a very different picture many an outsider draws of the manner in which a seeker in the heavens works! He is imagined like Tycho Brahe to be surrounded by unusual pieces of apparatus, spying through the ocular of a long range refractor into the universe, seeking to unravel its ultimate secrets. The true picture does not correspond to this fancy in the slightest. Nothing in the make-up of the room reminds one of super-earthly sublimity, no abundance of instruments or books is to be seen, and one soon becomes aware that here a thinker reigns whose only requirement for his work, which encompasses the world, is his own mind, plus a sheet of paper and a pencil. All that acts on the observatories outside, that gives rise to great scientific expeditions, that, indeed, ultimately regulates the relationship of mankind to the constitution of the universe, the revolution in the knowledge of things connecting heaven and earth, all this is here concentrated in the simple figure of a still youthful scholar, who spins out endless threads from the fabric of his mind: the words of a poet are recalled to our memory, which, addressed to all of us, have been fulfilled to the last degree by one living among us:—