does nonetheless
not come easy — today's person of sixty-seven is by no
means the same as was the one of fifty, of thirty, or of
twenty. Every reminiscence is colored by today's being
what it is, and therefore by a deceptive point of view.
This consideration could very well deter. Nevertheless
much can be lifted out of one's own experience which is
not open to another consciousness.
Even when I was a fairly precocious young man the
nothingness of the hopes and strivings which chase
most men restlessly through life came to my consciousness
with considerable vitality. Moreover, I soon discovered
the cruelty of that chase, which in those years
was much more carefully covered up by hypocrisy and
glittering words than is the case today. By the mere existence
of his stomach everyone was condemned to participate
in that chase. Moreover, it was possible to satisfy
the stomach by such participation, but not man in so far
as he is a thinking and feeling being. As the first way
out there was religion, which is implanted into every
child by way of the traditional education-machine. Thus
I came— despite the fact that I was the son of entirely
irreligious (Jewish) parents—to a deep religiosity, which,
however, found an abrupt ending at the age of twelve.
Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon
reached the conviction that much in the stories of the
Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively
fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression
that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state
through lies; it was a crushing impression. Suspicion
against every kind of authority grew out of this expehttps://
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rience, a skeptical attitude towards the convictions which
were alive in any specific social environment — an attitude
which has never again left me, even though later on,
because of a better insight into the causal connections, it
lost some of its original poignancy.
It is quite clear to me that the religious paradise of
youth, which was thus lost, was a first attempt to free
myself from the chains of the "merely-personal," from
an existence which is dominated by wishes, hopes, and
primitive feelings. Out yonder there was this huge world,
which exists independently of us human beings and
which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at
least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking.
The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation,
and I soon noticed that many a man whom I had
learned to esteem and to admire had found inner freedom
and security in devoted occupation with it. The
mental grasp of this extra-personal world within the
frame of the given possibilities swam as the highest aim
half consciously and half unconsciously before my mind's
eye. Similarly motivated men of the present and of the
past, as well as the insights which they had achieved,
were the friends which could not be lost. The road to
this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the
road to the religious paradise; but it has proved itself
as trustworthy, and I have never regretted having
chosen it.
WHAT I have here said is true only within a certain
sense, just as a drawing consisting of a few strokes
can do justice to a complicated object, full of perplexing
details, only in a very limited sense. If an individual
enjoys well-ordered thoughts, it is quite possible that
this side of his nature may grow more pronounced at the
cost of other sides and thus, may determine his mentality
in increasing degree. In this case it is well possible that
such an individual in retrospect sees a uniformly systematic
development, whereas the actual experience takes
place in kaleidoscopic particular situations. The manifoldness
of the external situations and the narrowness
of the momentary content of consciousness bring about
a sort of atomizing of the life of every human being. In
a man of my type the turning-point of the development
lies in the fact that gradually the major interest dishttps://
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engages itself to a far-reaching degree from the momentary
and the merely personal and turns towards the
striving for a mental grasp of things.
What, precisely, is "thinking"? When, at the reception
of sense-impressions, memory-pictures emerge, this is
NOVEMBER 26, 1949
9
not yet "thinking." And when such pictures form series,
each member of which calls forth another, this, too, is
not yet "thinking." When, however, a certain picture
turns up in many such series, then — precisely through
such return — it becomes an ordering element for such
series, in that it connects series which in themselves are
unconnected. Such an element becomes an instrument,
a concept- I think that the transition from free association
or "dreaming" to thinking is characterized by the
more or less dominating role which the ^'concept'' plays
in it. It is by no means necessary that a concept must
be connected with a sensorily cognizable and reproducible
sign (word); but when this is the case thinking becomes
by means of that fact communicable.
With' what right — the reader will ask — doe^ this man
operate so carelessly and primitively with ideas in such
a problematic realm without making even the least effort
to prove anything? My defense: all our thinking is of
this nature of a free play with concepts; the justification
for this play lies in the measure of survey over the experience
of the senses which we are able to achieve with
its aid. The concept of "truth" can not yet be applied to
such a structure; to my thinking this concept can come
in question only when a far-reaching
agreement (convention) concerning
the elements and rules of
the game is already at hand.
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For me it is not dubious that our
thinking goes on for the most part
without use of signs (words) and
beyond that to a considerable
degree unconsciously. For how,
otherwise, should it happen that
sometimes we "wonder" quite
spontaneously about some experience?
This "wondering" seems to
occur when an experience comes
into conflict with a world of concepts
which is already sufficiently
fixed in us. Whenever such a conflict
is experienced hard and intensively
it reacts bacl<: upon our thought world in a decisive
way. The development of this thought world is in a
certain sense a continuous flight from "wonder."
A wonder of such nature I experienced as a child of
four or five years, when my father showed me a compass.
That this needle behaved in such a determined way
did not at all fit into the nature of events which could
find a place in the unconscious world of concepts (effect
connected with direct "touch"). I can still remember —
or at least believe I can remember — that this experience
made a deep and lasting impression upon me. Something
deeply hidden had to be behind things. What man
sees before him from infancy causes no reaction of this
kind; he is not surprised over the falling of bodies, concerning
wind and rain, nor concerning the differences between
living and non-living matter.
At the age of twelve I experienced a second wonder of
a totally different nature: in a little book dealing with
Euclidian plane geometry, which came into my hands at
the beginning of a school year. Here were assertions, as
for example the intersection of the three altitudes of a
triangle in one point, which — though by no means evident
— could nevertheless be proved with such certainty
that any doubt appeared to be out of the question. This
lucidity and certainty made an indescribable impression
upon me. That the axiom had to be accepted unproved
did not disturb me. In any case it was quite sufficient for
me if I could peg proofs upon propositions the validity
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of which did not seem to me to be dubious. For example,
I remember that an uncle told me the Pythagorean
theorem before the holy geometry booklet had come into
my hands. After much effort I succeeded in "proving"
this theorem on the basis of the similarity of triangles;
in doing so it seemed to me "evident" that the relations
of the sides of the right-angled triangles would have to
be completely determined by one of the acute angles.
Only something which did not in similar fashion seem to
be "evident" appeared to me to be in need of any proof
at all. Also, the objects with which geometry deals
seemed to be of no different type than the objects of
sensory perception, "which can be seen and touched."
This primitive idea, which probably also lies at the bottom
of the well-known Kantian problematic concerning
the possibility of "synthetic judgments a priori" rests
obviously upon the fact that the relation of geometrical
concepts to objects of direct experience (rigid rod, finite
interval, etc.) was unconsciously present.
If thus it appeared that it was possible to get certain
knowledge of the objects of experience by means of pure
thinking, this "wonder" rested upon an error. Nevertheless,
for anyone who experiences it for the first time, it
is marvelous enough that man is capable at all of reaching
such a degree of certainty and purity in pure thinking as
the Greeks showed us for the first
time to be possible in geometry.
From the age of twelve to sixteen
I familiarized myself with the
elements of mathematics together
with the principles of differential
and integral calculus. In doing so
I had the good fortune of hitting
upon books which were not too
particular in their logical rigor, but
which made up for this by permitting
the main thoughts to stand out
clearly and synoptically. This occupation
was, on the whole, truly ,
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fascinating; climaxes were reached
whose impression could easily compete
with that of elementary geometry—
the basic idea of analytical
geometry, the infinite series, the concepts of differential
and integral. I also had the good fortune of getting to
know the essential results and methods of the entire field
of the natural sciences in an excellent popular exposition,
which limited itself almost throughout to qualitative
aspects (Bernstein's "People's Books on Natural Science,"
a work of five or six volumes), a work which I read with
breathless attention. I had also already studied some
theoretical physics v/hen, at the age of seventeen, I entered
the Polytechnic Institute of Zurich.
There I had excellent teachers (for example, Hurwitz,
Minkowski), so that I really could have gotten a sound
mathematical education. However, I worked most of the
time in the physical laboratory, fascinated by the direct
contact with experience. The balance of the time I used
in the main in order to study at home the works of
Kirchhoff, Helmholtz, Hertz, etc. The fact that I neglected
mathematics to a certain extent had its cause not merely
in my stronger interest in the natural sciences than in
mathematics but also in the following strange experience,
I saw that mathematics was split up into numerous
specialities, each of which could easily absorb the short
lifetime granted to us. Consequently I saw myself in the
position of Buridan's ass, which was unable to decide
upon any specific bundle of hay. This was obviously due
to the fact that my intuition was not strong enough in
the field of mathematics in order to differentiate clearly
the fundamentally important, that which is really basic,
from the rest of the more or less dispensable erudition.
Beyond this, however, my interest in the knowledge
10
iTie Saturday Review
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Einstein
of nature was also unqualifiedly
stronger; and it was not clear to me as
a student that the approach to a more
profound knowledge of the basic
principles of physics is tied up with the
most intricate mathematical methods.
This dawned upon me only gradually
after years of independent scientific
work. True enough, physics also was
divided into separate fields, each of
which was capable of devouring a short
lifetime of work without having satisfied
the hunger for deeper knowledge.
The mass of insufficiently connected experimental
data was overwhelming
here also. In this field, however, I soon
learned to scent out that which was
able to lead to fundamentals and to
turn aside from everything else, *from
the multitude of things which clutter
up the mind and divert it from the essential.
The hitch in this was, of course,
that one had to cram all this stuff
into one's mind for the examinations.