1705038112 西南联大英文课（英汉双语版） [:1705033837]

1705038113 24　技术文明

1705038114

1705038115 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。

1705038116

1705038117 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。

1705038118

1705038119 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。

1705038120

1705038121 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。

1705038122

1705038123 （罗选民　译）

1705038124

1705038125 西南联大英文课（英汉双语版） [:1705033838]

1705038126 25 THE SOCIAL VALUE OF THE COLLEGE-BRED

1705038127

1705038128 By William James

1705038129

1705038130

1705038131 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.

1705038132

1705038133

1705038134

1705038135 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.

1705038136

1705038137 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.

1705038138

1705038139 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?

1705038140

1705038141 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.

1705038142

1705038143 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.

1705038144

1705038145 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.

1705038146

1705038147 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.

1705038148

1705038149 The sense for human superiority ought, then, to be considered our line, as boring subways is the engineer’s line and the surgeon’s is appendicitis. Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for the better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities, and a disgust for cheap Jacks. We ought to smell, as it were, the difference of quality in men and their proposals when we enter the world of affairs about us. Expertness in this might well atone for some of our awkwardness at accounts, for some of our ignorance of dynamos. The best claim we can make for the higher education, the best single phrase in which we can tell what it ought to do for us, is, then, exactly what I said: it should enable us to know a good man when we see him .

1705038150

1705038151 That the phrase is anything but an empty epigram follows from the fact that if you ask in what line it is most important that a democracy like ours should have its sons and daughters skilful, you see that it is this line more than any other. “The people in their wisdom”—this is the kind of wisdom most needed by the people. Democracy is on its trial, and no one knows how it will stand the ordeal. Abounding about us are pessimistic prophets. Fickleness and violence used to be, but are no longer, the vices which they charge to democracy. What its critics now affirm is that its preferences are inveterately for the inferior. So it was in the beginning, they say, and so it will be world without end. Vulgarity enthroned and institutionalized, elbowing everything superior from the highway, this, they tell us, is our irremediable destiny; and the picture-papers of the European continent are already drawing Uncle Sam with the hog instead of the eagle for his heraldic emblem. The privileged aristocracies to the foretime, with all their iniquities, did at least preserve some taste for higher human quality and honor certain forms of refinement by their enduring traditions. But when democracy is sovereign, its doubters say, nobility will form a sort of invisible church, and sincerity and refinement, stripped of honor, precedence, and favor, will have to vegetate on sufferance in private corners. They will have no general influence. They will be harmless eccentricities.

1705038152

1705038153 Now, who can be absolutely certain that this may not be the career of democracy? Nothing future is quite secure; states enough have inwardly rotted; and democracy as a whole may undergo self-poisoning. But, on the other hand, democracy is a kind of religion and we are bound not to admit its failure. Faiths and utopias are the noblest exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker’s picture. The best of us are filled with the contrary vision of a democracy stumbling through every error till its institutions glow with justice and its customs shine with beauty. Our better men shall show the way and we shall follow them;so we are brought round again to the mission of the higher education in helping us to know the better kind of man whenever we see him.

1705038154

1705038155 The notion that a people can run itself and its affairs anonymously is now well known to be the silliest of absurdities. Mankind does nothing save through initiatives on the part of inventors, great or small, and imitation by the rest of us—these are the sole factors active in human progress. Individuals of genius show the way, and set the patterns, which common people then adopt and follow. The rivalry of the patterns is the history of the world . Our democratic problem thus is statable in ultra-simple terms: Who are the kind of men from whom our majorities shall take their cue? Whom shall they treat as rightful leaders? We and our leaders are the x and the y of the equation here; all other historic circumstances, be they economical, political, or intellectual, are only the background of occasion on which the living drama works itself out between us.

1705038156

1705038157 In this very simple way does the value of our educated class define itself; we more than others should be able to divine the worthier and better leaders. The terms here are monstrously simplified, of course, but such a bird’s-eye view lets us immediately take our bearings. In our democracy, where everything else is so shifting, we alumni and alumnæ of the colleges are the only permanent presence that corresponds to the aristocracy in older countries. We have continuous traditions, as they have; our motto, too, is noblesse oblige ;and, unlike them, we stand for ideal interests solely, for we have no corporate selfishness and wield no powers of corruption. We ought to have our own class-consciousness.“Les intellectuels!” What prouder club-name could there be than this one, used ironically by the party of “red blood,” the party of every stupid prejudice and passion, during the anti-Dreyfus craze, to satirize the men in France who still retained some critical sense and judgment! Critical sense, it has to be confessed, is not an exciting term, hardly a banner to carry in processions. Affections for old habit, currents of self-interest, and gales of passion are the forces that keep the human ship moving; and the pressure of the judicious pilot’s hand upon the tiller is a relatively insignificant energy. But the affections, passions, and interests are shifting, successive, and distraught;they blow in alteration while the pilot’s hand is steadfast. He knows the compass, and, with all the leeways lie is obliged to tack toward, he always makes some headway. A small force, if it never lets up, will accumulate effects more considerable than those of much greater forces if these work inconsistently. The ceaseless whisper of the more permanent ideals, the steady tug of truth and justice, give them but time, must warp the world in their direction.

1705038158

1705038159 This bird’s-eye view of the general steering function of the college-bred amid the driftings of democracy ought to help us to a wider vision of what our colleges themselves should aim at. If we are to be the yeast cake for democracy’s dough, if we are to make it rise with culture’s preferences, we must see to it that culture spreads broad sails. We must shake the old double reefs out of the canvas into the wind and sunshine, and let in every modern subject, sure that any subject will prove humanistic, if its setting be kept only wide enough.

1705038160

1705038161 Stevenson says somewhere to his reader: “You think you are just making this bargain, but you are really laying down a link in the policy of mankind.” Well, your technical school should enable you to make your bargain splendidly;but your college should show you just the place of that kind of bargain—a pretty poor place, possibly—in the whole policy of mankind. That is the kind of liberal outlook, of perspective, of atmosphere, which should surround every subject as a college deals with it.

[ 上一页 ]  [ :1.705038112e+09 ]  [ 下一页 ]