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6. Is the acquisitive instinct of the earth’s multitudes a more important force than the acquisitive instinct of the capitalist?
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7. In what way is machine civilization dynamic? What can we say of the future of this civilization?
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参考译文
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【作品简介】
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《技术文明》一文选自查尔斯·奥斯丁·比尔德所著《人类去往何处？》，由朗文·格林出版公司出版。后收录入李普曼及内文斯编写的《现代读本》，由波士顿的D. C．赫斯出版公司1936年出版，见于166—167页。
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【作者简介】
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查尔斯·奥斯丁·比尔德（1874—1948），美国历史学家，于1907年至1917年在哥伦比亚大学教授政治学，1922年赴日本任东京市政研究所所长。次年大地震后成为日本内务部部长后藤子爵的顾问，之后他投身于写作、公民事务及学术团体的活动。
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西南联大英文课（英汉双语版） [:1705033837]
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24 技术文明
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相比东方或中世纪文明，什么是西方或现代文明呢？根本上讲，前者以农业或手工艺商业为基础，后者则立足于机械和科学之上。其实这就是技术文明。迄今，它只有两百多年历史，其影响力不但没有减弱，反而稳步延伸到农业和手工业领域。如果从专利局登记簿、产量数据还有实验报告提供的可信证据来看的话，技术文明毫无萎靡迹象，反而虎视眈眈，要征服、改变全世界。
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考虑到技术文明的内在本质，该文明表现出若干具体特征。从根本上说，技术文明依赖动力驱动的机械装置，这类装置超越了人工操作者的身体极限，能够无限地成倍增加商品生产力。科学在其分支学科里，包括物理、化学、生物、心理学等，起着支撑及服务本体系的作用。粗制滥造的年代已经过去，自然科学的持续研究绝对是机械发展和市场拓展的必要条件，这样才能不断推出新产品、提供新工艺、营造新的生活方式。科研经费的相应增长得益于工业税收和资本主义巨头的赠予，如此一来，便引发和刺激了大家对科学的好奇心。这种好奇心会蔓延，带着一种前所未有的敏感嗅觉介入到思想的各个领域。工业产出满足全球众多人口的需求，因此，伴随机械时代而来的必然是大规模生产与营销。
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目前，机械文明与资本主义关联一起，促使大规模生产发展到了现今阶段。而机械文明绝不是资本主义，不是一个不断变化的剥削系统。资本家开设工厂并进行大量生产，经济学家特别强调其追求利益的本能，但这毫无疑问也是一个巨大推动力。必须谨记，大多数人们追求物品等级、舒适度及安全感的热情是相同的，这构成了上述的那种重要推动力。据我们了解，资本主义很可能就是在这种推动力下得以存在。能有衣穿，人们就不会选择光着身子；可以取暖，人们就不会选择受寒挨冻；能享受干净卫生的环境，人们就不会选择被病痛恶疾缠身。事实上，世上的苦行者和自笞者不属于主流文明，而且在所有文明中，他们的作用和贡献也值得怀疑。
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在此我们把机械文明看作一种秩序，但实际上，这种秩序不同于其他，其本身具有活力及不断重构的属性。机械文明之前是农业文明时代，那时候的农业文明只是随市场波动、政府更迭、知识更新而缓慢改变，以确保其文明结构世代完整。同样，前机械时代的城市文明，也在长期的发展过程中保留了重要特征。而基于技术、科学、发明还有市场扩张的机械文明必须做出改变，而且要快速改变。电力刚一介入，蒸汽就建立了自己的地位。电力方才崭露头角，内燃机就独领风骚了。世上任何地方的任何秩序都无法与之相比，中世纪、古代经典还有东方世界的所总结的规律都无法解释其内涵，也无法启示其未来。
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（罗选民 译）
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西南联大英文课（英汉双语版） [:1705033838]
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25 THE SOCIAL VALUE OF THE COLLEGE-BRED
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By William James
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THE SOCIAL VALUE OF THE COLLEGE-BRED, by William James, published in McClure’s Magazine , Vol. XXX, p.419.Reprinted in Scott and Zeitlin,College Readings in English Prose , New York, MacMillan Company, 1920, pp. 137-144.
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William James （1842-1910）, American psychologist and philosopher, the brother of Henry James （1843-1916）, novelist and essayist. In 1890 William James published his epoch-making Principles of Psychology in which the germs of his philosophy are already discernible. His fascinating style, his broad culture and cosmopolitanism made him the most influential American thinker of his day.
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Of what use is a college training? We who have had it seldom hear the question raised—we might be a little nonplused to answer it offhand. A certain amount of meditation has brought me to this as the pithiest reply which I myself can give: The best claim that a college education can possibly make on your respect, the best thing it can aspire to accomplish for you is this—that it should help you to know a good man when you see him . This is as true of women’s as of men’s colleges; but that it is neither a joke nor a one-sided abstraction I shall now endeavor to show.
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What talk do we commonly hear about the contrast between college education and the education which business or technical or professional schools confer? The college education is called higher because it is supposed to be so general and so disinterested. At the “schools” you get a relatively narrow practical skill, you are told, whereas the “colleges” give you the more liberal culture, the broader outlook, the historical perspective, the philosophic atmosphere, or something which phrases of that sort try to express. You are made into an efficient instrument for doing a definite thing, you hear, at the schools; but, apart from that, you may remain a crude and smoky kind of petroleum, incapable of spreading light. The universities and colleges, on the other hand, although they may leave you less efficient for this or that practical task, suffuse your whole mentality with something more important than skill. They redeem you, make you well-bred; they make “good company” of you mentally. If they find you with a naturally boorish or caddish mind, they cannot leave you so, as a technical school may leave you. This, at least, is pretended; this is what we hear among college-trained people when they compare their education with every other sort. Now, exactly how much does this signify?
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It is certain, to begin with, that the narrowest trade or professional training does something more for a man than to make a skilful practical tool of him—it makes him also a judge of other men’s skill. Whether his trade be pleading at the bar or surgery or plastering or plumbing, it develops a critical sense in him for that sort of occupation. He understands the difference between second-rate and first-rate work in his whole branch of industry; he gets to know a good job in his own line, as soon as he sees it; and getting to know this in his own line, he gets a faint sense of what good work may mean anyhow, that may, if circumstances favor, spread into his judgments elsewhere. Sound work, clean work, finished work;feeble work, slack work, sham work—these words express an identical contrast in many different departments of activity. In so far forth, then, even the humblest manual trade may beget in one a certain small degree of power to judge of good work generally.
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Now, what is supposed to be the line of us who have the higher college training? Is there any broader line—since our education claims primarily not to be “narrow”—in which we also are made good judges between what is first-rate and what is second-rate only? What is especially taught in the colleges has long been known by the name of the “humanities,” and these are often identified with Greek and Latin. But it is only as literatures, not as languages, that Greek and Latin have any general humanity value; so that in a broad sense the humanities mean literature primarily, and in a still broader sense, the study of masterpieces in almost any field of human endeavor. Literature keeps the primacy; for it not only consists of masterpieces, but is largely about masterpieces, being little more than an appreciative chronicle of human master-strokes, so far as it takes the form of criticism and history. You can give humanistic value to almost anything by teaching it historically. Geology, economics, and mechanics are humanities when taught with reference to the successive achievements of the geniuses to which these sciences owe their being. Not taught thus, literature remains grammar, art a catalogue, history a list of dates, and natural science a sheet of formulas and weights and measures.
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The sifting of human creations! —nothing less than this is what we ought to mean by the humanities. Essentially this means biography; what our colleges should teach is, therefore, biographical history, that not of politics merely, but of anything and everything so far as human efforts and conquests are factors that have played their part. Studying in this way, we learn what types of activity have stood the test of time; we acquire standards of the excellent and durable. All our arts and sciences and institutions are but so many quests of perfection on the part of men; and when we see how diverse the types of excellence may be, how various the tests, how flexible the adaptations, we gain a richer sense of what the terms “better” and “worse” may signify in general. Our critical sensibilities grow both more acute and less fanatical. We sympathize with men’s mistakes even in the act of penetrating them; we feel that pathos of lost causes and misguided epochs even while we applaud what overcame them.
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Such words are vague and such ideas are inadequate, but their meaning is unmistakable. What the colleges—teaching humanities by examples which may be special, but which must be typical and pregnant—should at least try to give us, is a general sense of what, under various disguises, superiority has always signified and may still signify. The feeling for a good human job anywhere, the admiration of the really admirable, the disesteem of what is cheap and trashy and impermanent—this is what we call the critical sense, the sense for ideal values. It is the better part of what men know as wisdom. Some of us are wise in this way naturally and by genius; some of us never become so. But to have spent one’s youth at college, in contact with the choice and rare and precious, and yet still to be a blind prig or vulgarian, unable to scent out human excellence or to divine it amid its accidents, to know it only when ticketed and labeled and forced on us by others, this indeed should be accounted the very calamity and shipwreck of a higher education.