D O C U M E N T 2 0 6 M A Y 1 9 2 2 3 1 9 of light in vacuum, and thus utterly crushes down the most curious and oddest theo- ry of yours! But, to tell the truth, I am awkward, sir, to wield my pen, and I fear you may feel hard to catch the principal essence of my arfuments in papers, I expect therefore I shall be better understood by you when I see you personally. I rely upon your sincerity that you would, for the august sake of scientific truth, not ask me to keep silence for the time being, say till you breathe your last, that you may enjoy the popular favour in the mediocre society—that most detestable thing for a Naturforscher, as it is very often apt to degenerate him diverting him from his sincere interest found in the ever-lasting pursuit of more and more profound Nature. Nay, on the contrary, you must surely thank God that you are able to be relieved from your awaiting destiny of being pulled down into the deepest hell by a black Mephistopheles—the rank absurd postulate— for, you are blessed with ample share of time still to live enough to return to the orthodoxy, freeing from the de- structive spell that you have been fallen under so long since you were a youth of 26 years of age. The sooner the better: Ars longa, vita brevis[4] By the time you arrive, at all events, in our country, I will have got our people ready to welcome you with due knowledge as complete as possible about you and your theory.[5] It is with this view that I am preparing an essay for publicati- cation,[6] which has such contents as are shown in bare gists in the following: “No sooner had the fad for Einstein’s theory of relativity, that once swayed over the curiosity of mediocrity so successfully that even most of learned men conver- sely stood on the verge of being hurled into the most ridiculous confusion, is now already on the wane than a general outcry began to burst out:—‘Why, bah! ‘twas nothing but a hit-a-miss bunkum,—a farce at best!’ “Full of saddest pity upon the vain, evanescent glory of Einstein’s theory that had scarcely been won when it began to fall off, I have spared myself no trouble to search about if there might not be even a single shift that makes the theory possible to reveve but once more. “So I haunted the libraries, for instance, and most carefully revised the manu- scripts, so far as they came to my reach, of those who were most learned of all ma- sters of the Scholasticism or I studied most diligently the main principles of the profound logics adopted by them. Sometimes I consulted with some of the self- conceited seconders of the Einstein theory who appeared as if they had a firm belief that they were potent enough to drive the very natural phenomena themselves in the Chaos of Universe quite according to their own will by merely holding up a postu- late suited for the end.
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