Books: Einstein Obiter Dicta

COSMIC RELIGION—Albert Einstein— Covici, Friede ($1.50).*

Thanks to the Press, a rotund little quizzical-faced German-Jewish mathematician is known as the greatest man in the world today. Everything he says and does is News. If you are a careful newspaper reader you will find nothing new in this little collection of speeches and scraps of interviews, but you will rediscover many a bookworthy phrase, sentence.

Einstein takes Science religiously, thinks only heretics are capable of the highest religious experience. Morals, he says, require "no support from religion. Man's plight would, indeed, be sad if he had to be kept in order through fear of punishment and hope of rewards after death." Few men have a better right than Einstein to fear and dislike the Press. He calls it a "distorting mirror," hopes radio will be a better international language. Everybody knows Einstein is a Zionist, but perhaps not so many realize he is a militant pacifist. Of Fire-eater Hitler he takes a long and contemptuous view: "Hitler is living—or shall I say sitting?—on the empty stomach of Germany. As soon as economic conditions improve, Hitler will sink into oblivion. He dramatizes impossible extremes in an amateurish manner."

Like most great men Einstein is humble. Says he: "Working is thinking, hence it is not always easy to give an exact accounting of one's time. Usually I work about four to six hours a day. I am not a very diligent man."