Great Innocent

THE WORLD As I SEE IT--Albert Einstein--Covici, Friede ($2.50). The world at large considers Albert Einstein a great but a harmless man. His rare combination of mysterious ability and mysterious innocence has captured the world's imagination, made him a kind of latter-day saint. But most men of Einstein's reputation are better known. A few newspaper interviews, a few speeches, press discussions of his famed four-page pamphlet on the special theory of relativity are the sum total of his public communications. This officially translated selection from his "articles, addresses and manifestoes" should enhance Einstein's reputation as an able innocent, a scientific saint.

Though there is much personal revelation in The World As I See It, it is largely unconscious, unintended. First half of the book is taken up with scientific papers (on the method of theoretical physics, the mechanics of Newton, the theory of relativity) which most plain readers will boggle at, pass over. Even here, however, Einstein, the innocent, occasionally shows his face, as when he speaks of the conscientiousness of scientists: "The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshipper or the lover; the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or programme, but straight from the heart."

In the second half of his book Einstein speaks not as scientist but as human being and citizen of the world. Here is reprinted the complete correspondence between him and the Prussian Academy of Sciences on the occasion of his resignation last year from the Academy. Here, too, is his famed reply to the Woman Patriot Corporation, which protested his visit to the U. S. ("Never yet have I experienced from the fair sex such energetic rejection of all advances; or if I have, never from so many at once. . . .") In six brief pages he sums up his personal philosophy, his worldview:

"I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves--on an ethical basis I consider these the ideals of an inferior being. ... I went my own way and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; despite the existence of these ties, I have never lost an obstinate sense of detachment, of the need for solitude--a feeling which increases with the years. . . .

"My political ideal is democratic. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. . . . 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. . . . 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; a backbone was all he needed.

"War seems to me a mean, contemptible thing. I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business. . . . [My religious feeling] takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. . . ."

The Author. Born in a comfortable middle-class family at Ulm, on the Danube, in 1879, Albert Einstein spent his youth in Munich, where his father was part-owner of an electrotechnical plant. When Albert was 15, family reverses took the Einsteins to Milan. There he left school to study art, then to Zurich to learn how to become a breadwinning engineer. In 1902 he got a job in the Bern Patent Office as engineer and technical adviser. Three years later, when he was 26, he published his cosmos-shaking Special Theory of Relativity in the Annals of Physics. His General Theory of Relativity was published in the midst of the War (1916), the Unitary Field Theory 13 years later. Though only twelve men in the world are popularly supposed to understand Einstein's theory, the world now regards him as the successor of Galileo and Newton. In 1921 he won the Nobel Prize for Physics.

Short, rotund, with a greying golliwogg mop of hair, Einstein hates to wear a hat, likes to wander in the country or sail a small boat, plays the violin with concert skill. Last March he was put on the official Nazi black list, deprived of German citizenship. Though he has Swiss citizen ship, Einstein has lived in the U. S. since last autumn, goes each winter to work at the Flexner-directed Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. There he lives in the seclusion he likes, with his comfortable Hausfrau.

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