Einstein, the searcher

by Alexander Moszkowski

In Newton's soul obedience and the wish to obey must have been pre-eminent traits. Is he not reputed to have been pious and strong of faith?

Einstein confirmed this, and, raising his voice, he generalized from it, saying: "In every true searcher of Nature there is a kind of religious reverence; for he finds it impossible to imagine that he is the first to have thought out the exceedingly delicate threads that connect his perceptions. The aspect of knowledge which has not yet been laid bare gives the investigator a feeling akin to that experienced by a child who seeks to grasp the masterly way in which elders manipulate things."

This explanation implied a personal confession. For he had spoken of the childlike longing felt by all, and had interpreted the subtle intricacies of the scientist's ideas in particular as springing from a religious source. Not all have confessed this; we know, indeed, that the convictions of many a one were not so. Let us cling to the fact that the greatest in the realm of science—Newton, Descartes, Gauss, and Helmholtz—were pious, although their faith varied in degree. And let us not forget that the most bitter opponent of this attitude of mind, the originator of "Ecrasez l'infame," finally had a temple built bearing the inscription: "Deo erexit Voltaire."

In Newton positivism found its most faithful disciple, and his research was directly affected by his religious attitude. He, himself, was the author of that beautiful thought: "A limited measure of knowledge takes us away from God; an increased measure of knowledge takes us back to Him." It was he who considered that the world-machine that he had disclosed was not sufficiently stabilized by his mathematical law, and so he enlisted the intermittent help of an assistant for the Creator, Concursus Dei, to attend to the functioning of the machine. Finally, he slipped from the path of naïve faith on to theological bypaths and wrote devout essays on apocalyptic matters. On the other hand, Descartes' piety, which was genuine at root, exhibited suspicious offshoots, and one cannot shake off the feeling that he was smiling up his sleeve when he was making some of his solemn declarations. He was a master of compromise, and gave due expression to its spirit, which F. A. Lange bluntly stated was merely a veil for "Cowardice towards the Church." Voltaire, an apostle of Newton's system of natural philosophy, went so far in his condemnation of Descartes' confession of faith that he affirmed: "The Cartesian doctrine has been mainly instrumental in persuading many not to recognize a God."

As Einstein had called special attention to the childlike nature of the scientist's root-impulse, I quoted a remark of Newton that seemed to me at the moment to be a confirmation of Einstein's attitude:

"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

Are we not to regard this analogy of Newton's as being intended to convey a religious meaning?

"There is no objection to this," said Einstein, "although it seems to me more probable that, in saying this, Newton set down the view only of the pure investigator. The essential purpose of his remarks was to express how small is the range of the attainable compared with the infinite expanse offered for research."

Through some unexpected phrase that was dropped, the conversation took a new turn at this point, which I should not like to withhold, inasmuch as it gave rise to a noteworthy observation of Einstein about the nature of genius. We were talking about the "possibility of genius for science being inherited" and about the comparative rareness with which it occurs. There seems to have been only one case of a real dynasty of great minds, that of the ten Bernoullis who were descended of a line of mathematicians, and all of them achieved important results, some of them making extraordinary discoveries. Why is this exception unique? In other examples we do not get beyond three or four names in the same family, even if we take Science and Art conjointly. There were two Plinys, two Galileis, two Herschels, two Humboldts, two Lippis, two Dumas, several Bachs, Pisanos, Robbias, and Holbeins—the net result is very poor, even if we count similar names, disregarding the fact of relationship; there is no recognizable dynasty except in the case of the ten Bernoullis.[2] "And so," I continued, "the conclusion seems justified that Nature has nothing to do with a genealogy of talents, and that, if we happen to notice manifestations of talent in one and the same family, this is a mere play of chance."

[2]The Roman family Cosmati (of the thirteenth century), which gave us seven splendid representatives of architecture and mosaic work, hardly comes into consideration, since not one of them is regarded in the history of art as a real genius.