Einstein's Space Is No Closer To Reality

If One Looks With A Cold Eye At The Mess Man Has Made Of His History, It Is Difficult To Avoid The Conclusion That He Has Been Afflicted By Some Built-in Mental Disorder Which Drives Him Towards Self-destruction. Murder Within The Species On An Individual Or Collective Scale Is A Phenomenon Unknown In The Whole Animal Kingdom, Except For Man, And A Few Varieties Of Ants And Rats.

Wars Are Not Fought For Territory, But For Words. Man's Deadliest Weapon Is Language. He Is As Susceptible To Being Hypnotized By Slogans As He Is To Infectious Diseases. And Where There Is An Epidemic, The Group-mind Takes Over.

Some Tribes [of Monkeys] Have Taken To Washing Potatoes In The River Before Eating Them, Others Have Not. Sometimes Migrating Groups Of Potato-washers Meet Non-washers, And The Two Groups Watch Each Other's Strange Behavior With Apparent Bewilderment. But Unlike The Inhabitants Of Lilliput, Who Fought Holy Crusades Over The Question At Which End To Break The Egg, The Potato-washing Monkeys Do Not Go To War With The Non-washers, Because The Poor Creatures Have No Language Which Would Enable Them To Declare Washing A Diving Commandment And Eating Unwashed Potatoes A Deadly Heresy.

The Revolutions Of Thought Which Shape The Basic Outlook Of An Age Are Not Disseminated Through Text-books- They Spread Like Epidemics, Through Contamination By Invisible Agents And Innocent Germ Carriers, By The Most Varied Forms Of Contact, Or Simply By Breathing The Common Air.

The Discoveries Of Yesterday Are The Truisms Of Tomorrow, Because We Can Add To Our Knowledge But Cannot Subtract From It.