Yet a shadow of doubt crossed my mind. Einstein's discoveries came to light in the year 1905--that is, at a time when hardly a cloud was visible to forewarn us of the storms which were to uproot absolutism in the world. But what if a different kind of necessity had imposed itself on world-history, and hence on the world-view? Nowadays we know from authentic accounts, which no one doubts, that all that we have experienced during the war and the revolution has hung upon the activities of one frail human being of quite insignificant exterior, a bureaucrat of the Wilhelm-Strasse, a choleric eccentric who succeeded in frustrating the Anglo-German alliance which was unceasingly being pressed upon us for six long years after the beginning of the century. Amid the noisy progress of universal evolution the secret and insignificant nibbling of a mole cannot be regarded as of momentous importance for history, and yet if we eliminate it from the complete picture of events we find as a result that all our experiences have been inverted. Absolutism would not have been thrown overboard, but would probably have kept the helm with greater mastery than ever as the exponent of an Anglo-German hegemony of the world, and a political outlook fundamentally different in tendency would now have been prevailing on the earth. But Einstein's Theory of Relativity would not have taken the slightest heed of this. It would have arisen independently of the current forms of political conceptions, simply because we had reached that point in our intellectual development and because Einstein was living and spinning his webs of thought. And the question whether his theory will also have crushed absolutism for the non-physicist cannot be answered. It may indeed be doubted whether its time had already come. In the case of many important events in the history of thought their moment of birth can be fixed to within about ten years, as for example the Theory of Evolution, which had been conceived in several minds at the same time and had of necessity to come to life in one of them, even if it had failed in the case of the others. I venture to say that without Einstein, the Theory of Relativity in its widest sense, that is, including the new doctrine of gravitation, would perhaps have had to wait another two hundred years before being born. This contradiction is cleared up if we use sufficiently great time intervals. History does not adapt itself to the time measures of politics and of journalism, and philosophies are not to be calculated in terms of days. The philosophy of Aristotle held sway right through the Middle Ages, and that of Epicurus will gain its full force only in the coming generation. But if we make our unit a hundred years the connexion between philosophies and great discoveries remains true.