D O C . 3 1 8 C R I S I S O F T H E O R E T I C A L P H Y S I C S 2 4 9 Europe and for his sharing with me unforgettable hours as a prescient and warm person.[1] His purview of the grand economic correlations, his psychological appreciation of the peculiarities of nations, of all classes of people, his knowledge of individual persons was admirable. And he loved everyone, even though he knew them, as one who has the strength to say yes to this life. A priceless mixture of ear- nestness and genuine Berlin humor made his speech a unique pleasure when he chatted at table among friends. It is easy enough to be an idealist when one is living in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land but he was an idealist even though he was living on Earth and knew its odor as others rarely do. I regretted that he became a minister. Given the attitude of a large majority of the educated class in Germany toward Jews, it is my conviction that proud reserve by Jews in public life would be the natural thing.[2] Still, I would not have thought that hate, delusion, and ingratitude would go so far. To those, however, who have been guiding the ethical upbringing of the German people in the last fifty years,[3] I would like to call out: By their fruits ye shall know them. Albert Einstein. 318. “On the Present Crisis of Theoretical Physics”[1] [Einstein 1922o] DATED August 1922 IN: Kaizo 4, no. 12 (December 1922): 1–8. The goal of theoretical physics is to create a logical system of concepts based on the fewest possible mutually independent hypotheses, allowing a causal under- standing of the entire complex of physical processes.[2] In response to the question of how this scientific system developed and grew, in the time before Maxwell one would have been able to give the following answer. One first grounds the immovable basis of all exact science on uncontested facts of human observation or of human thought, namely on geometry and analysis. The Greeks already did this, so those coming afterwards had little left to do of principal novelty besides developing infinitesimal calculus. Then came the establishment of the actual fundamental laws of physics, i.e., the fundamental laws of mechanics by Galileo, Newton, and their contemporaries. Until around the end of the 19th [p. 816] [p. 1]