The world I see it: an extraordinary essay by Albert
Einstein
"How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is
here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he 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 have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends
in themselves -- this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals
that 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 empty to me. 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 friends, 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..."
"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-beings, 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 for any organization to reach its goals, one man must 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. In my opinion, an
autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low
morality... 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... This plague-spot 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!
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the
mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that 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 only this sense, I
am a deeply religious man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity
and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as
well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that
manifests itself in nature."
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