D O C . 4 7 9 O N I D E A L S 7 5 1 Published in La Prensa, 28 April 1925, p. 10. TRANSLATION On Ideals By Albert Einstein (Special for La Prensa) All lives, both individual and collective, after satisfying their most common ma- terial needs, yearn for a world of superior values which, because of its reactive ef- fect on men, tends to make them nobler and more spiritual. All things begin with myth, primitive religion, pure animism, the deification of nature and the forces that control it. But in the subsequent development of the “European” people, the deter- mination of life’s values and ideals is in no sense limited to religion rather, through constant growth, as well as historical evolution, it becomes externalized, most no- tably in the literary, artistic, and philosophical life of nations. This fact, or rather, these fields of intellectual production, which for the most part are essentially sub- jective and perhaps the principal ideals of life, differ markedly from Eastern thought,[1] in which the great religious systems and compendiums of knowledge, of equally religious character, constitute almost all of superior and superhuman truth, and with their pretensions of eternal validity and objectivity, exclude histor- ical evolution as well as a multiplicity of doctrines and those who teach them. Linked to this formal distinction is also the essential one: the European ideal of life tends, first and foremost, to produce a “great and unique personality,” set apart from the crowd and from the present moment. The quintessential European ideal is that of “the hero, the fighter,” and its devotion to the world of ideals beyond the material is practically the equivalent of a “veneration of heroes” tinged with religious over- tones. This explains the mythical character acquired by men like Caesar and Napo- leon, but spiritual creators—a Dante, a Goethe, a Nietzsche—can also take on heroic proportions in the conscience of the people. The Asian ideal, unlike the Eu- ropean, entirely disregards the man of action and his culmination in the heroic. In this regard Taoism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity completely coincide. For them, doctrine comes first, devotion to an idea that is valid for all, the recommen- dation of a morally pure life. The contradiction resulting from this contrast between East and West can be noted throughout the history of European Christianity, so that despite the widespread Christianization of the continent, the Christian ideal of life never managed to prevail to the exclusion of all others. This ideal has a passive
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