Youthful impetuosity, which in boys of a similar age usually expresses itself in rash enterprises and loose tricks, did not appear in him. His spirit was adjusted to contemplation, and an inborn fatalism, diffused with a super-sensuous element appertaining to dreams, restrained him from responding to external impulses. He reacted slowly and hesitatingly, and he interpreted what his senses offered him and all the little experiences of early days in terms of a reverence reflected from within. Words did not easily rise from his lips, and measured by the ordinary scale of rapidity of learning and readiness in answering questions, he would scarcely have been judged to possess unusual gifts. As an infant he had started to talk so late that his parents had been in some alarm about the possibility of an abnormality in their child. At the age of eight or nine years he presented the picture of a shy, hesitating, unsociable boy, who passed on his way alone, dreaming to himself, and going to and from school without feeling the need of a comrade. He was nicknamed "Biedermaier," because he was looked on as having a pathological love for truth and justice. What at that time seemed to be pathological, to-day appears as a deeply rooted and irrepressible natural instinct. Whoever has got to know Einstein as a man and as a scientist knows that this failing of his boyhood was but the forerunner of a very healthy outlook. Signs of his love for music showed themselves very early. He thought out little songs in praise of God, and used to sing them to himself in the pious seclusion that he preserved even with respect to his parents. Music, Nature, and God became intermingled in him in a complex of feeling, a moral unity, the traces of which never vanished, although later the religious factor became extended to a general ethical outlook on the world. At first he clung to a faith free from all doubt, as had been infused into him by the private Jewish instruction at home and the Catholic instruction at school. He read his Bible without feeling the need of examining it critically; he accepted it as a simple moral teaching and found himself little inclined to confirm it by rational arguments inasmuch as his reading extended very little beyond its circle. Painful inner conflicts were not wanting. Jewish children formed a small minority in the school, and it was here that the boy Albert felt the first ripples of the anti-semitic wave that, sweeping on from without, was threatening to overwhelm master and pupil alike. For the first time he felt himself oppressed by something that was not in harmony with his simple temperament. His modesty made him a prey to injustice, and in defending himself his originally gentle and restrained nature gained a certain independence and individuality.