What an extraordinary situation is that of us mortals! Each of us is
here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he
sometimes thinks he feels it. But from the point of view of daily life,
without going deeper, we exist for our fellow-men — in the first place
for those on whose smiles and welfare all our happiness depends, and
next for all those unknown to us personally with whose destinies we are
bound up by the tie of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind
myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labours 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 am strongly
drawn to the simple life and am often oppressed by the feeling that I
am engrossing an unnecessary amount of the labour of my fellow-men. I
regard class differences as contrary to justice and, in the last
resort, based on force. I also consider that plain living is good for
everybody, physically and mentally.
In human freedom in the philosophical sense I am
definitely a disbeliever. Everybody acts not only under external
compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity. Schopenhauer's
saying, that "a man can do as he will, but not will as he will," has
been an inspiration to me since my youth up, and a continual
consolation and unfailing well-spring of patience in the face of the
hardships of life, my own and others'. This feeling mercifully
mitigates the sense of responsibility which so easily becomes
paralyzing, and it prevents us from taking ourselves and other people
too seriously; it conduces to a view of life in which humour, above
all, has its due place.
To inquire after the meaning or object of one's own
existence or of creation generally has always seemed to me absurd from
an objective point of view. And yet everybody has certain ideals which
determine the direction of his endeavours and his judgments. In this
sense I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves
— such an ethical basis I call more proper for a herd of swine. The
ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new
courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.
Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind, of preoccupation
with the objective, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and
scientific research, life would have seemed to me empty. The ordinary
objects of human endeavour — property, 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 freedom
from the need for direct contact with other human beings and human
communities. I gang my own gait 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 an obstinate sense of
detachment, of the need for solitude — a feeling which increases with
the tears. One is sharply conscious, yet without regret, of the limits
to the possibility of mutual understanding and sympathy with one's
fellow-creatures. Such a person no doubt loses something in the way of
geniality and light-heartedness; on the other hand, he is largely
independent of the opinions, habits, and judgments of his fellows and
avoids the temptation to take his stand on such insecure foundations.
My political ideal is that of 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
respect from my fellows through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The
cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to
understand the one or two ideas to which I have with my feeble powers
attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that it is
necessary for the success of any complex undertaking that one man
should do the thinking and directing and in general bear the
responsibility. But the led must not be compelled, they must be able to
choose their leader. An autocratic system of coercion, in my opinion,
soon degenerates. For 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
to-day. The thing that has brought discredit upon the prevailing form
of democracy in Europe to-day is not to be laid to the door of the
democratic idea as such, but to lack of stability on the part of the
heads of governments and to the impersonal character of the electoral
system. I believe that in this respect the United States of America
have found the right way. They have a responsible President who is
elected for a sufficiently long period and has sufficient powers to be
really responsible. On the other hand, what I value in our political
system is the more extensive provision that it makes for the individual
in case of illness or need. The really valuable thing in a pageant of
human life seems to me not the 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 the herd
nature, the military system, which I abhor. That a man can take
pleasure in marching in formation 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. This plague-spot of civilization ought to
be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism by order, senseless
violence, and all the pestilent nonsense that goes by the name of
patriotism — how I hate them! War seems to me a mean, contemptible
thing: I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an
abominable business. And yet so high, in spite of everything, is my
opinion of the human race that I believe this bogey would have
disappeared long ago, had the sound sense of the nations not been
systematically corrupted by commercial and political interests acting
through the schools and the Press.
The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It
is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and
true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer
feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the
experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered
religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot
penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most
radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most
elementary forms — it is this knowledge and this emotion that
constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this
alone, I am a deeply religious man. I cannot conceive of a God who
rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which
we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his
physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it
otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble
souls. Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life, and the
inkling of the marvelous structure of reality, together with the
single-hearted endeavour to comprehend a portion, be it never so tiny,
of the reason that manifests itself in nature.