1In the second autumn after the war, the most famous man alive took a slow train out of the Dutch city of Leiden, and then walked, to a village among flat fields called Rijnsburg.
2There was a small brick house there, low and plain, at the end of a lane. Two hundred and sixty years before, a young man had rented a room in it. He had been cast out by his own people in Amsterdam for his thoughts, and he had come to this village to be quiet, and to grind lenses for his bread, and to write down what he saw.
3You have heard of him already: Baruch Spinoza, who said that God and the Whole are not two things but one, and that to understand the Weave is to love it.
4The famous man took off his hat at the door. He stood a long time in the little room with the grinding bench and the one window. He wrote his name in the keeper's book. He said very little.
5He had first read the lens-grinder as a poor clerk in Bern, aloud, with friends, over sausage. He had gone back to him many times since. That year he wrote a verse about him, a clumsy loving verse, which begins by saying how he loves that noble man, more than he can say with words.
6Why did he love him? Because the clerk had spent his life finding that the world is lawful to its roots: that the same quiet rule holds for a falling hat and a wandering planet and a beam of starlight. And each time he found it so, he felt something that he could only call by an old name. He felt awe. He felt that he stood before a mind, though not a mind like a man's.
7The lens-grinder had given him leave to feel that, without bowing to a king in the sky.
8He spoke of this God often, and half in jest, as one speaks of an old neighbour. Once, in America, he was told that a man had made a measurement which, if it stood, would overthrow his whole teaching. He was not troubled. He said: "Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not." The masters of that place liked the saying so well that they cut it in stone over a hearth, and it is there now.
9He meant: the Weave is hard to read, but it does not cheat. It does not lay false tracks. What it hides, it hides by depth and not by trickery.
10Hold that saying in your mind. It was soon to be tested harder than he knew.
11For in those years a new teaching was rising among the young, and it had grown from a seed that he himself had planted, when he said that light comes in grains.
12The young ones went down into the rooms of the atom, where the woman of Paris had first opened the door. And there they found that nothing behaved as things should. A grain of matter was also a wave. A thing could be in this place and that place until it was looked at.
13One of them, Heisenberg, a young German with a climber's legs, was soon to write down a hard saying: of the smallest things, you cannot know both where a thing is and how it is moving. The more closely you fix the one, the more the other slips away. This is not for want of a better glass. It is how the world is made. At the bottom there is a blur that no craft will ever sharpen.
14And another of them, the clerk's own friend Max Born, had already said a harder thing still. The laws at the bottom do not tell you what will happen. They tell you only the odds. This atom of radium will break today, or in a thousand years; nothing in the Weave decides which. There is no cause to be found. There is only the count of chances.
15The clerk could not bear it. All his life had rested on one faith: that if you knew the whole state of things now, the next moment followed from it as a sum follows from its numbers. And he wrote to Born:
16"I, at any rate, am convinced that He is not playing at dice."
17They met to fight it out, all the great ones of that science, in the city of Brussels, at the falling of the leaves. For a week it went the same way. Each morning at breakfast the clerk would come down with a new trap for the new teaching: suppose a box, suppose a slit, suppose a clock. And a slow-spoken Dane named Bohr, the gentlest and most stubborn man in Europe, would go about all day muttering, and by supper he would have found the flaw.
18A friend of them both watched, and wept a little, and told the clerk to his face that he was ashamed for him: he was arguing against the new thing just as his enemies had argued against him.
19He did not yield. He never yielded, to the end of his days. And here is a matter for you to weigh. Nearly a hundred years have gone by, and wiser tools than his have been turned upon the question, and the dice have not been taken away. As far as anyone can tell, on this one thing the greatest reader of the Weave was wrong, and the blur at the bottom is real.
20Do not think less of him. Think instead how strange it is. The man who had torn down the great clock over the world could not give up the great sum under it. Each of us has a last thing we cannot doubt. It is well to know where yours is.
21And yet he was right in the larger matter, and Bohr would have said so too. The dice are not a cheat. The odds themselves are lawful, and they are the same for everyone, in Brussels and on the farthest star. The Weave is subtle. It is not malicious.
22Now hear how he came to name his God before the whole world. It happened because of fifty words.
23In the twenty-ninth year of the century he turned fifty, and hid from the feasting in a gardener's hut. A few weeks later, across the sea, a prince of the Roman church in the city of Boston warned his people against the new teaching of time and space. He said that it wrapped the question of God in fog, and that behind the fog stood unbelief.
24There was a rabbi in New York, Herbert Goldstein, a faithful shepherd of his people, who was troubled by this. He honoured the clerk. He did not want to see him named a godless man. So he did a plain and sensible thing. He sent a cable under the sea to Berlin, asking: do you believe in God? And he paid in advance for an answer of fifty words.
25The clerk answered at once, in his own tongue. He did not need the fifty. In the English of the newspapers it ran:
26"I believe in Spinoza's God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind."
27Read it twice. It is the hinge of this whole book.
28He did not say there is no God. He would not let anyone call him a denier; the deniers, he said in other places, could not hear the music of the spheres. And he did not say there is a judge above the clouds who counts our sins and may be moved by pleading. He said that what is holy is the Whole itself and the order in it. It does not speak. It does not choose a people. It is revealed to anyone, of any nation, who will look.
29The rabbi was not offended. He read the answer out to his people. He said that Spinoza had been called a man drunk with God, who saw God in all of nature, and that no one could fairly call such a man godless. There were others, of his faith and of the church of Rome, who were less pleased, and said so loudly. The clerk did not answer them. He had been asked a question and had told the truth.
30Mark who was speaking. He was born of the same people as the lens-grinder. The elders of Amsterdam had cast Spinoza out with a curse for saying this very thing, and for two hundred years his name had been spoken low. Now the best-known man on earth sent it under the ocean by wire, in a sentence, and the newspapers of the world set it in their largest letters.
31The ember that was carried out of Amsterdam in a poor man's coat had been lifted up where all could see it.
32He had four years left in his own country.
33The shouting man was rising. His followers had hated the clerk for a long time: for being a Jew, for speaking against the war, for a teaching they could not follow and so called a Jewish trick. A hundred of their learned men had put out a book against him. A friend of his, a minister of the state and a Jew, had been shot dead in his open car on a Berlin street, and the police had come to warn the clerk that his name was on the same list.
34He had built a small wooden house by a lake at a village called Caputh, with a boat. He loved it more than any place he had lived. He sailed alone there for hours with the sail slack, letting the boat drift, thinking.
35In the last month of the thirty-second year he and his wife Elsa locked the house to go to America for the winter. It is told that on the step he said to her: look at it well; you will not see it again.
36He was in America when the shouting man was made master of the German lands. Within weeks the brown shirts broke into the house by the lake, looking for hidden guns. They found a bread knife. They took the house, and later the boat.
37He sailed back as far as Belgium. On the ship he wrote out a letter leaving the company of the masters of Berlin, before they could cast him out. In Brussels he went up the steps of his own country's office and laid down his passport, and came out a man of no country.
38He took a cottage among the sand-hills on the Belgian coast. The king of that land, who was his friend, set two guards over him, for word had come that a price was set on his head. It is told that he said he had not known he was worth so much. A picture-book of the enemies of the new Germany was printed that season. Under his face it said: not yet hanged.
39In May, on a night of rain, the students of Berlin made a fire in the square before the opera house. They came with torches, singing, and carts of books taken from the libraries. They threw twenty thousand onto the pile. His were among them. So were the books of Heine, a poet of the German tongue, who had written a hundred years before:
40"Where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people."
41That, too, was a true reading of the Weave. You will hear how true.
42In the autumn he crossed the ocean with Elsa and two trunks, and came to a quiet town in America called Princeton, with white wooden houses and old trees. He took a room for his work, and asked for a desk, a chair, paper and pencils, and a large basket, he said, for all his mistakes.
43He lived twenty-two years more. He never set foot in the German lands again.
44The children of Princeton got used to him: an old man with wild white hair and no socks, walking home slowly along the same street every day, sometimes stopping dead on the pavement with his head on one side. They did not know what he was listening for.
45He was listening for what he had always listened for. He believed to the last that under the blur and the dice there lay a deeper law, one harmony for the great things and the small. He looked for it for thirty years. He did not find it. No one has found it yet.
46Was that a wasted evening of a life? Ask it another way. A man is driven from his house, his books are burned, his name is set on a list for killing, his kin are scattered. What does he do? He takes a room, and a pencil, and goes on trying to read the Whole. He cannot be made to stop loving it. That is what it is to say yes to the Weave. It is not to say that all is well. It is to say: this is the world, it is lawful and it is one, and I would rather understand it than curse it.
47The lens-grinder did the same in his rented room, with the curse of his people still fresh on him. He ground his glass. He wrote his book. He died poor, his chest worn out, it is thought, by the dust of his own lenses, and he asked for nothing.
48Two exiles, nearly three hundred years apart, and one God between them, who does not concern Himself with the fate of men. Then who will? That is the question the century was now about to ask, in fire. If the Whole will not reach down to stay the hand of the one who closes ways, there is only one other hand that can.