《我的知识之路》第五章 成长中的一次危机 下一个阶段

CHAPTER V A Crisis In My Mental History, One Stage Onward

第五章 成长中的一次危机 下一个阶段

For some years after this time I wrote very little, and nothing regularly, for publication: and great were the advantages which I derived from the intermission. It was of no common importance to me, at this period, to be able to digest and mature my thoughts for my own mind only, without any immediate call for giving them out in print. Had I gone on writing, it would have much disturbed the important transformation in my opinions and character, which took place during those years. The origin of this transformation, or at least the process by which I was prepared for it, can only be explained by turning some distance back.

此后几年我很少写作，定期发表的文章也一篇都没有：我从这段间歇期中获益匪浅。在此期间，我能够消化完善我的思考，无人催促我立即写出来发表，这对我来说是至关重要的。如果我当时继续写作的话，就会大大扰乱那几年我的见解和性格的重要转变。要解释这个转变的源头，或者至少我为此准备的过程，就只能从较早前说起。

From the winter of 1821, when I first read Bentham, and especially from the commencement of the Westminster Review, I had what might truly be called an object in life: to be a reformer of the world. My conception of my own happiness was entirely identified with this object. The personal sympathies I wished for were those of fellow labourers in this enterprise. I endeavoured to pick up as many flowers as I could by the way; but as a serious and permanent personal satisfaction to rest upon, my whole reliance was placed on this; and I was accustomed to felicitate myself on the certainty of a happy life which I enjoyed, through placing my happiness in something durable and distant, in which some progress might be always making, while it could never be exhausted by complete attainment. This did very well for several years, during which the general improvement going on in the world and the idea of myself as engaged with others in struggling to promote it, seemed enough to fill up an interesting and animated existence. But the time came when I awakened from this as from a dream. It was in the autumn of 1826. I was in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to; unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent; the state, I should think, in which converts to Methodism usually are, when smitten by their first "conviction of sin." In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: "Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?" And an irrepressible selfself-consciousness distinctly answered, "No!" At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

从1821年冬天起，我刚开始读边沁的作品，尤其是从《威斯敏斯特评论》创刊起，我就有了一个真正可以称为人生目标的东西，即要成为一名社会改革家。我对自己幸福的设想与这个目标完全相同。我希望得到的个人共鸣就是为此事业努力的同事的共鸣。在这个过程中，我努力获得尽可能多的成就。但是，我把最为严肃、永久性的个人满足全都毫无保留地寄托在这上面了。我习惯了庆幸过着自己喜欢的幸福生活，而这要把自己的幸福寄托在持久、遥远的东西上，要总能实现一些进步，而又永远不会因为完全实现而耗尽。有好几年情况一直很好，那时世界总体上一直在进步，我的观点也和别人的观点结合一起，在努力促进进步，这似乎足以让生活情趣盎然、充满活力。但是，有一天我从这里面醒来，像从梦里醒来一样。那是1826年的秋天，我处于神经麻木的状态，就像每个人偶尔都会有的情形一样，感觉不到快乐或兴奋。在别的时候应该是高兴的心情，在这时变成乏味或冷漠。我认为，改信循道宗教的人第一次因“深信有罪”而备受折磨的时候，就是这种状态。在这种心境下，我直接问了自己一个问题：“假如一生中所有的目标都实现了，你期盼的所有制度和观念的改变都能立刻完全实现，这会不会是你巨大的幸福和快乐？”一个抑制不住的自我意识清楚地回答道：“不是！”这时，我心情低落极了，我建立生活的整个基础坍塌了。我所有的幸福原本在于坚持不懈地追求这个目标。而现在目标已经不再有吸引力了，我又怎么会继续对实现目标的手段感兴趣呢？我似乎没有活着的目标了。

At first I hoped that the cloud would pass away of itself; but it did not. A night's sleep, the sovereign remedy for the smaller vexations of life, had no effect on it. I awoke to a renewed consciousness of the woeful fact. I carried it with me into all companies, into all occupations. Hardly anything had power to cause me even a few minutes' oblivion of it. For some months the cloud seemed to grow thicker and thicker. The lines in Coleridge's "Dejection"—I was not then acquainted with them—exactly describe my case:

最初，我希望阴云能自己散去，但是没有。晚上好好睡一觉，是解决生活中小烦恼的特效药，但对它却没有作用。我醒来后，重新意识到这个悲哀的事实。我带着它到所有朋友那里，到所有工作中去。几乎没有任何事情能使我忘记它几分钟。有几个月，阴云似乎越积越厚了。柯尔律治《沮丧》里面的几行诗——我当时还没读过——准确地描述了我的情况：

A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear, A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief, Which finds no natural outlet or relief In word, or sigh, or tear.

没有剧痛的悲伤、空虚、忧郁、凄凉，困倦的、窒息的、没有激情的悲伤，无法用语言、叹息或泪水自然地排遣。

In vain I sought relief from my favourite books; those memorials of past nobleness and greatness from which I had always hitherto drawn strength and animation. I read them now without feeling, or with the accustomed feeling minus all its charm; and I became persuaded, that my love of mankind, and of excellence for its own sake, had worn itself out. I sought no comfort by speaking to others of what I felt. If I had loved any one sufficiently to make confiding my grief a necessity, I should not have been in the condition I was. I felt, too, that mine was not an interesting, or in any way respectable distress. There was nothing in it to attract sympathy. Advice, if I had known where to seek it, would have been most precious. The words of Macbeth1 to the physician often occurred to my thoughts. But there was no one on whom I could build the faintest hope of such assistance. My father, to whom it would have been natural to me to have recourse in any practical difficulties, was the last person to whom, in such a case as this, I looked for help. Everything convinced me that he had no knowledge of any such mental state as I was suffering from, and that even if he could be made to understand it, he was not the physician who could heal it. My education, which was wholly his work, had been conducted without any regard to the possibility of its ending in this result; and I saw no use in giving him the pain of thinking that his plans had failed, when the failure was probably irremediable, and, at all events, beyond the power of his remedies. Of other friends, I had at that time none to whom I had any hope of making my condition intelligible. It was however abundantly intelligible to myself; and the more I dwelt upon it, the more hopeless it appeared.

我试图从最喜欢的书中寻求解脱，但没有用。那些对过去高尚和伟大的记录，我以前总能从中获得力量和活力，但现在读它们，我毫无感觉，或者仅仅有习惯性的感觉，却丧失了曾有的魅力。我开始相信，我对人类的热爱和对卓越本身的热爱已经耗尽了。我也没有告诉别人我的感觉以寻求安慰。如果我疯狂地爱着一个人，让我觉得必须向他倾诉我的悲伤，我就不会陷入当时的境地了。我还觉得，我的痛苦并不是个有趣或者在任何方面可敬的沮丧。它不能博得同情。建议会是非常宝贵的，但我不知去哪里找寻。麦克白对医生说的话，经常浮现在我的脑海里。但是，没有一个人能让我寄希望于寻求这种帮助，即便是最微弱的希望。在我陷入任何实际困难的时候，自然应该去找父亲帮忙，但在这种情况下，他是我最不愿意求助的人。所有迹象都让我相信，他完全不了解我正在遭受的精神痛苦，即使能让他理解，他也不是能够治好它的医生。我的教育完全是他的成果，他在教导我的时候从来没有考虑过出现这种结果的可能性。如果失败无法补救，并且完全超出了他的补救能力的话，让他承受计划失败的痛苦，我觉得完全没有用。当时，我也没有指望任何朋友可以理解我的情形。然而，我自己却非常理解，而且越细想，这情形越显得绝望。

My course of study had led me to believe, that all mental and moral feelings and qualities, whether of a good or of a bad kind, were the results of association; that we love one thing and hate another, take pleasure in one sort of action or contemplation, and pain in another sort, through the clinging of pleasurable or painful ideas to those things, from the effect of education or of experience. As a corollary from this, I had always heard it maintained by my father, and was myself convinced, that the object of education should be to form the strongest possible associations of the salutary class; associations of pleasure with all things beneficial to the great whole, and of pain with all things hurtful to it. This doctrine appeared inexpugnable; but it now seemed to me on retrospect, that my teachers had occupied themselves but superficially with the means of forming and keeping up these salutary associations. They seemed to have trusted altogether to the old familiar instruments, praise and blame, reward and punishment. Now, I did not doubt that by these means, begun early, and applied unremittingly, intense associations of pain and pleasure, especially of pain, might be created, and might produce desires and aversions capable of lasting undiminished to the end of life. But there must always be something artificial and casual in associations thus produced. The pains and pleasures thus forcibly associated with things, are not connected with them by any natural tie; and it is therefore, I thought, essential to the durability of these associations, that they should have become so intense and inveterate as to be practically indissoluble, before the habitual exercise of the power of analysis had commenced. For I now saw, or thought I saw, what I had always before received with incredulity—that the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings: as indeed it has when no other mental habit is cultivated, and the analysing spirit remains without its natural complements and correctives. The very excellence of analysis (I argued) is that it tends to weaken and undermine whatever is the result of prejudice; that it enables us mentally to separate ideas which have only casually clung together: and no associations whatever could ultimately resist this dissolving force, were it not that we owe to analysis our clearest knowledge of the permanent sequences in nature; the real connexions between Things, not dependent on our will and feelings; natural laws, by virtue of which, in many cases, one thing is inseparable from another in fact; which laws, in proportion as they are clearly perceived and imaginatively realized, cause our ideas of things which are always joined together in Nature, to cohere more and more closely in our thoughts. Analytic habits may thus even strengthen the associations between causes and effects, means and ends, but tend altogether to weaken those which are, to speak familiarly, a mere matter of feeling. They are therefore (I thought) favourable to prudence and clear-sightedness, but a perpetual worm at the root both of the passions and of the virtues; and above all, fearfully undermine all desires, and all pleasures, which are the effects of association, that is, according to the theory I held, all except the purely physical and organic; of the entire insufficiency of which to make life desirable, no one had a stronger conviction than I had. These were the laws of human nature, by which, as it seemed to me, I had been brought to my present state. All those to whom I looked up, were of opinion that the pleasure of sympathy with human beings, and the feelings which made the good of others, and especially of mankind on a large scale, the object of existence, were the greatest and surest sources of happiness. Of the truth of this I was convinced, but to know that a feeling would make me happy if I had it, did not give me the feeling. My education, I thought, had failed to create these feelings in sufficient strength to resist the dissolving influence of analysis, while the whole course of my intellectual cultivation had made precocious and premature analysis the inveterate habit of my mind. I was thus, as I said to myself, left stranded at the commencement of my voyage, with a well-equipped ship and a rudder, but no sail; without any real desire for the ends which I had been so carefully fitted out to work for: no delight in virtue or the general good, but also just as little in anything else. The fountains of vanity and ambition seemed to have dried up within me, as completely as those of benevolence. I had had (as I reflected) some gratification of vanity at too early an age: I had obtained some distinction, and felt myself of some importance, before the desire of distinction and of importance had grown into a passion: and little as it was which I had attained, yet having been attained too early, like all pleasures enjoyed too soon, it had made me blasé and indifferent to the pursuit. Thus neither selfish nor unselfish pleasures were pleasures to me. And there seemed no power in nature sufficient to begin the formation of my character anew, and create in a mind now irretrievably analytic, fresh associations of pleasure with any of the objects of human desire.

我的学习过程让我相信，所有心理和道德上的情感和品质，不管是好的还是坏的，都是联系的结果。我们喜欢这个东西，讨厌那个东西，进行这种行动或沉思很高兴，而进行另一种却很痛苦，这都是通过教育或经验的作用把愉快或痛苦的想法附加到这些东西上来实现的。从这种现象得出的推论就是，教育的目标应该是尽可能为有益的事物形成最强大的联系。给所有对整体有益的东西以愉快的联系。给对整体有害的东西以痛苦的联系。我总是听到父亲坚持这一结论，我自己也深信不疑。这个学说看起来坚不可摧，但回想起来，现在我觉得好像我的老师都只是很肤浅地专注于形成和维持这些有益联系的方法。他们似乎完全信任常用的旧手段，如表扬和批评、奖励和惩罚。现在我并不怀疑，如果这些方法使用得早并坚持不懈的话，就可能会创造出来痛苦和愉快的强烈联系，尤其是痛苦的联系，也可能会制造出能够持续至生命尽头都不减弱的渴望和厌恶。但是，这样产生的联系肯定总会有人为的和偶然的因素。这些痛苦和快乐是强行跟事物联系起来的，而不是通过自然纽带联系起来的。因此我想，这些联系应该在习惯运用分析能力之前就变得非常强烈和深刻，从而在现实中不会被拆开，这对于巩固这些联系至关重要。因为现在我看到了，或者觉得我看到了自己以前总是半信半疑的东西，即分析的习惯往往会折损感情。在其他思考习惯还未形成而分析精神仍没有自然的补充和矫正的时候，确实如此。（我坚持认为）分析的优点在于它往往会减弱和破坏由偏见造成的任何结果，它能让我们从心理上区分开只是偶然结合在一起的想法，任何联系最终都无法抵抗这种分解的力量，我们只能把对自然界永恒秩序的清楚认识归功于分析。事物之间的真正联系不依赖于我们的意志和感情。根据自然法则，在很多情况下一个事物在事实上和另一个事物密不可分。这些法则，按照我们清楚的感知和从想象中认识的程度，使我们对大自然中总是结合在一起的事物的认识在思想中结合得越来越紧密。因此分析的习惯甚至可能会加强原因和结果、手段和目标之间的联系，但是总体上往往会削弱纯粹感觉的东西（用大家熟悉的说法）。因此（我想）分析的习惯对于审慎和洞察力有利，但是永远是激情和美德根基处的害虫。最重要的是，它会摧毁所有由联系而成的渴望和快乐，也就是说，根据我所持的理论，除了纯物质和感官的渴望和快乐以外，其他的都会被破坏掉。我比谁都更加深信不疑，分析的习惯绝不会让生活变得愉悦。这些是人类本性的规律，我目前的状态也是这些规律作用的结果。我所尊敬的人都认为，对人类的同情所产生的快乐，那种把为别人，尤其是为人类大规模地谋取福利作为生存目标的感觉，是幸福最伟大、最可靠的源泉。我深信这是真的，但是知道拥有某种感觉能让我幸福，并不能给我这种感觉。我想教育为我创造这些感觉的力量还不够强大，无法抵挡分析的毁灭性影响，而我的整个智力培养过程都使早熟又不成熟的分析成为我思想中根深蒂固的习惯。因此我想，我在旅程刚开始时就搁浅了，虽然有装备精良的船只和舵，但是没有帆。我对做了精心准备去努力实现的目标没有真正的渴望，对美德或者公共利益没有兴趣，就像对其他事情一样。虚荣心和抱负的源泉像仁爱的源泉一样，似乎已经在我体内完全干涸了。（我回想起来）我在很小的时候虚荣心就曾获得了一些满足。在对荣誉和地位的渴望转化为激情之前，我获得了一些荣誉，觉得自己有些本事。事实上我获得的很少，而且得到的太早，就像所有享受得太快的快乐一样，它让我对这种追求感到厌倦和冷漠。因此，无论是自私的或不自私的快乐，对我来说都不是快乐。自然界似乎也没有什么力量能重塑我的性格，在一个如今无法复原分析能力的头脑里创造出快乐与人类渴望的任何事物之间的新联系。

These were the thoughts which mingled with the dry heavy dejection of the melancholy winter of 1826—7. During this time I was not incapable of my usual occupations. I went on with them mechanically, by the mere force of habit. I had been so drilled in a certain sort of mental exercise, that I could still carry it on when all the spirit had gone out of it. I even composed and spoke several speeches at the debating society, how, or with what degree of success I know not. Of four years continual speaking at that society, this is the only year of which I remember next to nothing. Two lines of Coleridge, in whom alone of all writers I have found a true description of what I felt, were often in my thoughts, not at this time (for I had never read them), but in a later period of the same mental malady:

这些想法夹杂着1826年忧郁的冬天里单调沉重的沮丧。这段时间里我还是能够从事日常的工作。但只是凭借习惯的力量，很机械地进行下去。我在智力运用上接受过良好的训练，因此可以在完全没有活力的时候仍继续进行。我甚至在辩论协会写了好几篇演讲稿，做了好几次演讲，怎么做的或者做得怎么样我就不知道了。在那个协会连续演说了四年，我几乎完全记不清的只有这一年。在所有诗人当中，我只在柯尔律治的诗里面发现两行对我的感觉的真实描述，这两行诗经常出现在我的脑海里，不是在这时（因为我还没读到），而是在这次成长危机的后期：

Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, And hope without an object cannot live.

没有希望地工作，如同把美酒装进筛子，没有目标的希望，无法存在。

In all probability my case was by no means so peculiar as I fancied it, and I doubt not that many others have passed through a similar state; but the idiosyncracies of my education had given to the general phenomenon a special character, which made it seem the natural effect of causes that it was hardly possible for time to remove. I frequently asked myself, if I could, or if I was bound to go on living, when life must be passed in this manner. I generally answered to myself, that I did not think I could possibly bear it beyond a year. When, however, not more than half that duration of time had elapsed, a small ray of light broke in upon my gloom. I was reading, accidentally, Marmontel's Mémoirs, and came to the passage which relates his father's death, the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be everything to them—would supply the place of all that they had lost. A vivid conception of the scene and its feelings came over me, and I was moved to tears. From this moment my burthen grew lighter. The oppression of the thought that all feeling was dead within me, was gone. I was no longer hopeless: I was not a stock or a stone. I had still, it seemed, some of the material out of which all worth of character, and all capacity for happiness, are made. Relieved from my ever present sense of irremediable wretchedness, I gradually found that the ordinary incidents of life could again give me some pleasure; that I could again find enjoyment, not intense, but sufficient for cheerfulness, in sunshine and sky, in books, in conversation, in public affairs; and that there was, once more, excitement, though of a moderate kind, in exerting myself for my opinions, and for the public good. Thus the cloud gradually drew off, and I again enjoyed life: and though I had several relapses, some of which lasted many months, I never again was as miserable as I had been.

我的情况很可能不如自己想象的那样特殊，而且我还相信很多人也经历过相似的情况。但是，我的教育的特质赋予了这一普遍现象一个很特殊的特点，使得它看起来像是某种原因引起的自然结果，几乎无法随着时间消逝。我经常问自己，如果生命必须以这种方式度过，我还能够继续活下去吗，或者一定要继续活下去吗？我通常回答自己说，我觉得很可能无法忍受超过一年时间。然而至多刚过一半的时候，一小缕阳光打破了我的忧郁。我当时在读马蒙泰尔的《回忆录》，很偶然地读到有一部分讲述他父亲的去世、家人的哀伤，以及当时还只是个小男孩的他突然间受到的启示，他感觉到，也让家人感觉到他可以成为他们的一切——去替代他们失去的一切。对这个场景和感受逼真的想象震撼了我，我感动得落泪了。从这时起，我的负担变轻了。以为所有感情都在内心深处枯竭了的想法给我造成的压力消失了。我不再绝望，我不是树干，也不是石头。我好像还有一些能够形成品格的价值，具备追求幸福能力的东西。从一直存在的、无可救药的悲惨感觉中解脱出来，我慢慢发现，生活中的平凡小事还能再次给我带来乐趣。我能再次从阳光、天空、书籍、交谈和公共事务中找到快乐，虽不强烈，但是足以让我高兴。而且再一次有了为自己的信念，为公共利益而行动起来的兴奋感，尽管是适度的兴奋。就这样，阴云慢慢散去了，我重新享受生活的乐趣。尽管复发了好几次，有时还持续好几个月，但是我再也没有像以前那样痛苦。

The experiences of this period had two very marked effects on my opinions and character. In the first place, they led me to adopt a theory of life, very unlike that on which I had before acted, and having much in common with what at that time I certainly had never heard of, the anti-self-consciousness theory of Carlyle. I never, indeed, wavered in the conviction that happiness is the test of all rules of conduct, and the end of life. But I now thought that this end was only to be attained by not making it the direct end. Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way. The enjoyments of life (such was now my theory) are sufficient to make it a pleasant thing, when they are taken en passant, without being made a principal object. Once make them so, and they are immediately felt to be insufficient. They will not bear a scrutinizing examination. Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation, exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it, without either forestalling it in imagination, or putting it to flight by fatal questioning. This theory now became the basis of my philosophy of life. And I still hold to it as the best theory for all those who have but a moderate degree of sensibility and of capacity for enjoyment, that is, for the great majority of mankind.

这段时期的经历对我的观点和性格有两个非常明显的影响。首先，它引导我采纳了一个人生理论，和我以前遵循的理论很不一样，与卡莱尔的反自我意识理论倒有诸多相似之处，不过我当时自然对其闻所未闻。实际上，我一直坚信幸福是所有行为规则的检验标准，也是生活的目标，从没动摇过。但是现在我觉得，这个目标只有在不把它当作直接目标的时候才能实现。（我想）只有这样的人才会幸福，他们不以自己的幸福为目标，而是把精力聚焦在别的事物上。聚焦在别人的幸福、人类的进步甚至某种艺术或追求上，不是把它作为一种手段，而是把它本身当作理想的目标来追寻。这样把目标定在别的事物上，他们也顺便找到了幸福。当我们把生活中的快乐当作附带品，而不是作为首要目标来对待时，它们就足以让生活成为快乐的事情（这就是我现在的理论）。一旦把快乐作为首要目标，就会很快感觉到它们不够用，也经不起仔细的推敲。你一旦问自己是否快乐时，你就不再快乐了。唯一的办法是把快乐以外的目标，而不是快乐本身作为生活的目标。让你的自我意识，你的仔细观察，你的自我审问都耗费在那个目标上面吧。另外，如果够幸运的话，你能从空气中呼吸到快乐，不必沉思或考虑，不会在想象中阻止它，或者用可怕的质问让它溃逃。这个理论现在成了我人生哲学的基础。对于所有只拥有普通感受能力和享乐能力的人来说，换句话说，对于大多数人来说，我仍然认为它是最好的理论。

The other important change which my opinions at this time underwent, was that I, for the first time, gave its proper place, among the prime necessities of human well-being, to the internal culture of the individual. I ceased to attach almost exclusive importance to the ordering of outward circumstances, and the training of the human being for speculation and for action. I had now learnt by experience that the passive susceptibilities needed to be cultivated as well as the active capacities, and required to be nourished and enriched as well as guided. I did not, for an instant, lose sight of, or undervalue, that part of the truth which I had seen before; I never turned recreant to intellectual culture, or ceased to consider the power and practice of analysis as an essential condition both of individual and of social improvement. But I thought that it had consequences which required to be corrected, by joining other kinds of cultivation with it. The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties, now seemed to me of primary importance. The cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed. And my thoughts and inclinations turned in an increasing degree towards whatever seemed capable of being instrumental to that object.

我的观点那时经历的另一个重要变化就是我第一次把个人的精神文化当做人类福利的一个首要条件。我不再只重视外部环境的安排以及对人类思索和行动能力的训练。我现在从经验中得知，被动的感受性也像积极的能力一样需要培养，必须得到滋养、充实以及指引。我没有片刻忽略或者低估从前看到的那部分真理。我从来没有怀疑过智育，或者否认分析的能力和习惯是个人和社会进步的必要条件。但是，它的有些结果需要通过与其他培养形式结合起来得以修正。在各种能力之间保持适当的平衡在我看来是最重要的。情感培养成为我伦理和哲学信条中的基本点之一。任何看上去能有助于实现这个目标的东西都成为我的思想和爱好越来越关注的对象。

I now began to find meaning in the things which I had read or heard about the importance of poetry and art as instruments of human culture. But it was some time longer before I began to know this by personal experience. The only one of the imaginative arts in which I had from childhood taken great pleasure, was music; the best effect of which (and in this it surpasses perhaps every other art) consists in exciting enthusiasm; in winding up to a high pitch those feelings of an elevated kind which are already in the character, but to which this excitement gives a glow and a fervour, which, though transitory at its utmost height, is precious for sustaining them at other times. This effect of music I had often experienced; but, like all my pleasurable susceptibilities, it was suspended during the gloomy period. I had sought relief again and again from this quarter, but found none. After the tide had turned, and I was in process of recovery, I had been helped forward by music, but in a much less elevated manner. I at this time first became acquainted with Weber's Oberon, and the extreme pleasure which I drew from its delicious melodies did me good, by showing me a source of pleasure to which I was as susceptible as ever. The good, however, was much impaired by the thought, that the pleasure of music (as is quite true of such pleasure as this was, that of mere tune) fades with familiarity, and requires either to be revived by intermittence, or fed by continual novelty. And it is very characteristic both of my then state, and of the general tone of my mind at this period of my life, that I was seriously tormented by the thought of the exhaustibility of musical combinations. The octave consists only of five tones and two semitones, which can be put together in only a limited number of ways, of which but a small proportion are beautiful: most of these, it seemed to me, must have been already discovered, and there could not be room for a long succession of Mozarts and Webers, to strike out, as these had done, entirely new and surpassingly rich veins of musical beauty. This source of anxiety may, perhaps, be thought to resemble that of the philosophers of Laputa2, who feared lest the sun should be burnt out. It was, however, connected with the best feature in my character, and the only good point to be found in my very unromantic and in no way honorable distress. For though my dejection, honestly looked at, could not be called other than egotistical, produced by the ruin, as I thought, of my fabric of happiness, yet the destiny of mankind in general was ever in my thoughts, and could not be separated from my own. I felt that the flaw in my life, must be a flaw in life itself; that the question was, whether, if the reformers of society and government could succeed in their objects, and every person in the community were free and in a state of physical comfort, the pleasures of life, being no longer kept up by struggle and privation, would cease to be pleasures. And I felt that unless I could see my way to some better hope than this for human happiness in general, my dejection must continue; but that if I could see such an outlet, I should then look on the world with pleasure; content as far as I was myself concerned, with any fair share of the general lot.

我现在开始发现，以前读到或听说的关于诗歌和艺术是人类文化重要传播工具的说法是很有意义的。但是通过亲身经历开始了解此事，是过了一阵子之后的事了。我从儿童时代就非常喜欢的有想象力的艺术只有音乐，音乐的最佳作用在于激发热情（在这一点上，它可能超越了其他艺术），在于高度提升品质中已有的高尚情感。而音乐的刺激让这种情感发光发热，尽管这光和热处于顶点的时间很短暂，但在其他时刻用于维持高尚的情感却是很宝贵的。我经常体验音乐的这种效果。但是，和我所有愉快的情感一样，它在我沮丧的那段时期也中断了。我曾一次次地从这里面寻求安慰，但是没有找到。趋势扭转后，我进入到恢复过程，而音乐在其中起到了促进作用，但是远不如以前那般慷慨激昂。这时，我第一次听了韦伯的《奥伯龙》，它那美妙的旋律向我展示了一种仍然容易感染我的快乐的源泉，我因而从中得到了极大的快乐，这对我很有益。然而，我觉得音乐带来的快乐（特别是这种纯粹的曲调带来的快乐)会因熟悉而减弱，需要隔一段时间再听，或者不断翻新才能保持，这种想法把音乐带给我的益处削弱了不少。音乐创作可竭尽性的想法严重地折磨着我，这既很符合我当时的状态，也很符合这段时间我的总体心境。八度音阶只有五个全音和两个半音，它们只能按照有限的几种方法组合在一起，而其中只有一小部分很美妙。并且在我看来，这一小部分中的绝大多数也一定已经被人发现了，不可能再有空间让很多人像莫扎特和韦伯一样，创造出完全清新、无比丰富的音乐来。这种焦虑的源头可能会被认为和勒普泰岛上害怕太阳会燃尽的哲学家类似。然而，它是和我性格里最好的特质联系在一起的，也是在我非常不浪漫、毫不可敬的忧虑中能找到的唯一优点。因为公正地看，我的沮丧是由于我幸福的构成遭到了毁灭，尽管这种沮丧只能被说成是任性的，然而我一直在思考人类总体的命运，并且不能把它和我的命运分开。我感觉，我人生中的缺点一定也是人生本身的瑕疵。问题在于，如果社会和政府改革家能实现他们的目标，社会上的每个人都是自由的，物质生活都是舒适的，人生中的快乐不再靠努力和艰难来维持的话，快乐是否就不再是快乐了。我觉得除非可以找到比这更好的为人类的总体幸福而努力的希望，否则我的沮丧就会继续下去；但是如果我能看到这样一条出路，我就应该愉快地看待世界。只要自己参与其中，公平地分享共同的命运，我就满意了。

This state of my thoughts and feelings made the fact of my reading Wordsworth for the first time (in the autumn of 1828) an important event in my life. I took up the collection of his poems from curiosity, with no expectation of mental relief from it, though I had before resorted to poetry with that hope. In the worst period of my depression, I had read through the whole of Byron (then new to me), to try whether a poet, whose peculiar department was supposed to be that of the intenser feelings, could rouse any feeling in me. As might be expected, I got no good from this reading, but the reverse. The poet's state of mind was too like my own. His was the lament of a man who had worn out all pleasures, and who seemed to think that life, to all who possess the good things of it, must necessarily be the vapid, uninteresting thing which I found it. His Harold and Manfred had the same burthen on them which I had; and I was not in a frame of mind to derive any comfort from the vehement sensual passion of his Giaours, or the sullenness of his Laras. But while Byron was exactly what did not suit my condition, Wordsworth was exactly what did. I had looked into The Excursion two or three years before, and found little in it; and I should probably have found as little, had I read it at this time. But the miscellaneous poems, in the two-volume edition of 1815 (to which little of value was added in the latter part of the author's life), proved to be the precise thing for my mental wants at that particular juncture.

我的这种思想和情感状态，让第一次（1828年秋天）读华兹华斯成为我人生中非常重要的事件。我是出于好奇才开始读他的诗集的，并没期盼从它那里得到精神慰藉，虽然我之前曾是带着这种希望去读诗的。在我最沮丧的那段时期，我读了拜伦的全部作品（我当时并不熟悉），想看看一个被认为特别善于抒发强烈感情的诗人能否激起我内心的任何情感。和预想的一样，我从这种阅读中没得到任何好处，只有坏处。这位诗人的心境和我的极其相似。他的诗是消磨掉所有快乐的人的悲叹，他似乎认为，人生对于所有拥有它的美好的人来说一定很乏味无趣，就像我对人生的感觉一样。他的《哈罗尔德》和《曼弗雷德》带有和我一样的负担。以我当时的心境，也无法从他的《异教徒》的强烈感官激情中，或者《拉腊》的忧郁中得到任何安慰。拜伦完全不适合我的情形，华兹华斯却正好适合。两三年前，我浏览了《漫游》，几乎没什么收获。如果这时候读的话，很可能还是收获很少。但是1815年两卷版的诗集中各种各样的诗歌（在诗人的人生晚期，这本诗集没有受到赏识），正好是那个特殊时刻满足我精神需求的东西。

In the first place, these poems addressed themselves powerfully to one of the strongest of my pleasurable susceptibilities, the love of rural objects and natural scenery; to which I had been indebted not only for much of the pleasure of my life, but quite recently for relief from one of my longest relapses into depression. In this power of rural beauty over me, there was a foundation laid for taking pleasure in Wordsworth's poetry; the more so, as his scenery lies mostly among mountains, which, owing to my early Pyrenean excursion, were my ideal of natural beauty. But Wordsworth would never have had any great effect on me, if he had merely placed before me beautiful pictures of natural scenery. Scott does this still better than Wordsworth, and a very second-rate landscape does it more effectually than any poet. What made Wordsworth's poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connexion with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed. And I felt myself at once better and happier as I came under their influence. There have certainly been, even in our own age, greater poets than Wordsworth; but poetry of deeper and loftier feeling could not have done for me at that time what his did. I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this, not only without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in the common feelings and common destiny of human beings. And the delight which these poems gave me, proved that with culture of this sort, there was nothing to dread from the most confirmed habit of analysis. At the conclusion of the Poems came the famous "Ode," falsely called Platonic, "Intimations of Immortality": in which, along with more than his usual sweetness of melody and rhythm, and along with the two passages of grand imagery but bad philosophy so often quoted, I found that he too had had similar experience to mine; that he also had felt that the first freshness of youthful enjoyment of life was not lasting; but that he had sought for compensation, and found it, in the way in which he was now teaching me to find it. The result was that I gradually, but completely, emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it. I long continued to value Wordsworth less according to his intrinsic merits, than by the measure of what he had done for me. Compared with the greatest poets, he may be said to be the poet of unpoetical natures, possessed of quiet and contemplative tastes. But unpoetical natures are precisely those which require poetic cultivation. This cultivation Wordsworth is much more fitted to give, than poets who are intrinsically far more poets than he.

首先，这些诗强有力地触动了我最强烈的一种快乐情感，即对乡村事物和自然风光的热爱。不仅我人生中的很多快乐都得益于它，就是最近我从最长时间的沮丧中解脱出来，也得益于它。在这乡村美景的力量下，我打下了欣赏华兹华斯诗歌的基础。此外，他描述的风景大部分在山间，而我年轻时曾在比利牛斯山脉旅行过，所以他描写的是我理想的自然美。但是，如果华兹华斯只是把自然风景的美丽图画呈现在我面前，那他根本就不会对我产生任何重大的影响。司各特在这上面比华兹华斯做得还要好一些，而非常普通的风景要比任何诗人更有效。华兹华斯的诗歌之所以是治疗我心情的良药，是因为它们不仅表达了外部美，还表达了内心感觉的状态以及在美的刺激下带有感情色彩的思想状态。它们似乎就是我寻求的情感陶冶。从它们那里，我似乎找到了内心喜悦、和谐和有想象力的快乐的源泉，这个源泉可以由整个人类分享。它与斗争或者瑕疵毫无联系，但是人类物质和社会环境的每次改善都能使它变得更丰富。从它们那里，我似乎得知了，当生活中所有大不幸都被排除的时候，什么会是幸福的永久源泉。在它们的影响下，我立刻感觉更好了，更高兴了。当然，即使在我们这个时代，也有比华兹华斯更伟大的诗人。但在当时，感情更深刻、更崇高的诗歌也不能像他的诗歌那样影响我。我需要有人让我感觉到宁静的思索中有真实持久的快乐。华兹华斯教会了我不仅不需要逃避人类的共同感情和共同命运，反而应对其兴趣大增。这些诗歌给我带来的快乐证明了只要有这种陶冶，最根深蒂固的分析习惯也没什么可怕的。在这些诗歌的最后，出现了著名的“颂歌”，被人错误地称为柏拉图式“不朽的暗示”。其中，除了比他平时更甜美的旋律和节奏以及常被引用的两段宏大但哲理肤浅的意象之外，我还发现他也有过和我类似的经历。他也感觉到年轻人享受人生的最初新鲜感不会持久，但是，他用现在他教我的这种方法寻求并得到了补偿。结果我慢慢地但却彻底地从我习惯性的沮丧中解脱了出来，再也没有遭受过它的折磨。我一直重视华兹华斯，主要是因为衡量了他为我所做的这些而非其内在价值。和最伟大的诗人相比，可以说他是没有诗人气质的诗人，但是他拥有从容和喜爱沉思的风格。而无诗人气质正好是需要用诗歌陶冶的气质。华兹华斯远比其他本质上更像诗人的诗人适合给予这种陶冶。

It so fell out that the merits of Wordsworth were the occasion of my first public declaration of my new way of thinking, and separation from those of my habitual companions who had not undergone a similar change. The person with whom at that time I was most in the habit of comparing notes on such subjects was Roebuck, and I induced him to read Wordsworth, in whom he also at first seemed to find much to admire: but I, like most Wordsworthians, threw myself into strong antagonism to Byron, both as a poet and as to his influence on the character. Roebuck, all whose instincts were those of action and struggle, had, on the contrary, a strong relish and great admiration of Byron, whose writings he regarded as the poetry of human life, while Wordsworth's, according to him, was that of flowers and butterflies. We agreed to have the fight out at our Debating Society, where we accordingly discussed for two evenings the comparative merits of Byron and Wordsworth, propounding and illustrating by long recitations our respective theories of poetry: Sterling also, in a brilliant speech, putting forward his particular theory. This was the first debate on any weighty subject in which Reobuck and I had been on opposite sides. The schism between us widened from this time more and more, though we continued for some years longer to be companions. In the beginning, our chief divergence related to the cultivation of the feelings. Roebuck was in many respects very different from the vulgar notion of a Benthamite or Utilitarian. He was a lover of poetry and of most of the fine arts. He took great pleasure in music, in dramatic performances, especially in painting, and himself drew and designed landscapes with great facility and beauty. But he never could be made to see that these things have any value as aids in the formation of character. Personally, instead of being, as Benthamites are supposed to be, void of feeling, he had very quick and strong sensibilities. But, like most Englishmen who have feelings, he found his feelings stand very much in his way. He was much more susceptible to the painful sympathies than to the pleasurable, and looking for his happiness elsewhere, he wished that his feelings should be deadened rather than quickened. And, in truth, the English character, and English social circumstances, make it so seldom possible to derive happiness from the exercise of the sympathies, that it is not wonderful if they count for little in an Englishman's scheme of life. In most other countries the paramount importance of the sympathies as a constituent of individual happiness is an axiom, taken for granted rather than needing any formal statement; but most English thinkers almost seem to regard them as necessary evils, required for keeping men's actions benevolent and compassionate. Roebuck was, or appeared to be, this kind of Englishman. He saw little good in any cultivation of the feelings, and none at all in cultivating them through the imagination, which he thought was only cultivating illusions. It was in vain I urged on him that the imaginative emotion which an idea, when vividly conceived, excites in us, is not an illusion but a fact, as real as any of the other qualities of objects; and far from implying anything erroneous and delusive in our mental apprehension of the object, is quite consistent with the most accurate knowledge and most perfect practical recognition of all its physical and intellectual laws and relations. The intensest feeling of the beauty of a cloud lighted by the setting sun, is no hindrance to my knowing that the cloud is vapour of water, subject to all the laws of vapours in a state of suspension; and I am just as likely to allow for, and act on, these physical laws whenever there is occasion to do so, as if I had been incapable of perceiving any distinction between beauty and ugliness.

这样的结果是，评价华兹华斯的优点成为我第一次公开宣布新思维方式，并与我那些没经历类似变化的同伴疏远的诱因。在此类问题上，我当时最习惯和罗巴克交换意见，我劝他读华兹华斯，他起先似乎也觉得华兹华斯很值得钦佩。但是我和大多数华兹华斯的追随者一样，强烈地抵制拜伦，既反对他的诗，也反对他对人们性格的影响。相反，作为行动派和奋斗派的罗巴克非常欣赏，也特别崇拜拜伦，他认为拜伦的作品是人类生活的诗歌，而华兹华斯的作品在他看来都是关于花朵和蝴蝶的。我们同意在辩论学会公开辩论，因此我们两个晚上都在那儿讨论拜伦和华兹华斯相形之下的优点，各自背诵冗长的诗歌理论并举例来说明这些优点。斯特林也用一个精彩的演讲提出了他自己独特的理论。这是罗巴克和我在有分量的问题上第一次站在不同的立场上。从这时起，我们的分歧越来越大，尽管接下来几年我们仍是朋友。起初，我们的主要分歧在于感情熏陶。罗巴克在很多方面与边沁主义者或者功利主义者的流行看法非常不同。他很热爱诗歌以及大部分优秀艺术。他特别喜欢音乐、戏剧表演，尤其是绘画，他自己设计、描绘的风景画很流畅，很美。但是他从来都不明白这些东西对性格的形成有何等帮助。就个人而言，他不像人们想象的功利主义者那样缺乏感情，他的感情非常敏锐，非常强烈。但是，和大多数有感情的英国人一样，他发现自己的感情非常碍事。与快乐的共鸣相比，他更容易受到痛苦的共鸣的影响，因此他在别处寻找快乐，希望自己的感情变迟钝，而不是敏锐。确实，英国人的性格和英国的社会环境使得英国人基本不可能从表达共鸣中得到幸福。因此如果共鸣在英国人的人生规划中无足轻重的话也不足为奇。在大多数其他国家，共鸣作为个人幸福的要素是极为重要的，是人们都习以为常的真理，不需要任何正式的声明。但是，似乎大多数英国思想家为了使人们的行为仁慈而慈悲，都把它当作不可避免的灾祸。罗巴克就是这种英国人，或者看起来是这样。他几乎看不到任何感情熏陶的好处，完全看不到通过想象培养感情的好处，他认为这只是在培养错觉。我徒劳地劝说他，如果想法构思得生动就会激发我们富有想象力的感情，这种感情不是幻想，而是事实，像物体的任何其他性质一样真实。在我们对事物的理解中这种感情绝不意味着错误和幻想，而是与该事物所有物质的、精神的规律及关系的最精确的了解以及最完美的实践认知相一致的。对落日染红了晚霞之美的最强烈的感情，不会阻碍我知道云是水蒸气，知道它遵从所有处于悬浮状态的水蒸气的定律。我同样会一有机会就考虑这些自然规律，并依照这些规律行事，就好像我不能察觉美和丑的任何区别一样。

While my intimacy with Roebuck diminished, I fell more and more into friendly intercourse with our Coleridgian adversaries in the Society, Frederick Maurice and John Sterling, both subsequently so well known, the former by his writings, the latter through the biographies by Hare and Carlyle. Of these two friends, Maurice was the thinker, Sterling the orator, and impassioned expositor of thoughts which, at this period, were almost entirely formed for him by Maurice. With Maurice I had for some time been acquainted through Eyton Tooke, who had known him at Cambridge, and although my discussions with him were almost always disputes, I had carried away from them much that helped to build up my new fabric of thought, in the same way as I was deriving much from Coleridge, and from the writings of Goethe and other German authors which I read during these years. I have so deep a respect for Maurice's character and purposes, as well as for his great mental gifts, that it is with some unwillingness I say anything which may seem to place him on a less high eminence than I would gladly be able to accord to him. But I have always thought that there was more intellectual power wasted in Maurice than in any other of my cotemporaries. Few of them certainly have had so much to waste. Great powers of generalization, rare ingenuity and subtlety, and a wide perception of important and unobvious truths, served him not for putting something better into the place of the worthless heap of received opinions on the great subjects of thought, but for proving to his own mind that the Church of England had known everything from the first, and that all the truths on the ground of which the Church and orthodoxy have been attacked (many of which he saw as clearly as any one) are not only consistent with the Thirty-nine Articles3, but are better understood and expressed in those Articles than by any one who rejects them. I have never been able to find any other explanation of this, than by attributing it to that timidity of conscience, combined with original sensitiveness of temperament, which has so often driven highly gifted men into Romanism from the need of a firmer support than they can find in the independent conclusions of their own judgment. Any more vulgar kind of timidity no one who knew Maurice would ever think of imputing to him, even if he had not given public proof of his freedom from it, by his ultimate collision with some of the opinions commonly regarded as orthodox, and by his noble origination of the Christian Socialist movement. The nearest parallel to him, in a moral point of view, is Coleridge, to whom, in merely intellectual power, apart from poetical genius, I think him decidedly superior. At this time, however, he might be described as a disciple of Coleridge, and Sterling as a disciple of Coleridge and of him. The modifications which were taking place in my old opinions gave me some points of contact with them; and both Maurice and Sterling were of considerable use to my development. With Sterling I soon became very intimate, and was more attached to him than I have ever been to any other man. He was indeed one of the most loveable of men. His frank, cordial, affectionate, and expansive character; a love of truth alike conspicuous in the highest things and the humblest; a generous and ardent nature which threw itself with impetuosity into the opinions it adopted, but was as eager to do justice to the doctrines and the men it was opposed to, as to make war on what it thought their errors; and an equal devotion to the two cardinal points of Liberty and Duty, formed a combination of qualities as attractive to me, as to all others who knew him as well as I did. With his open mind and heart, he found no difficulty in joining hands with me across the gulf which as yet divided our opinions. He told me how he and others had looked upon me (from hearsay information), as a "made" or manufactured man, having had a certain impress of opinion stamped on me which I could only reproduce; and what a change took place in his feelings when he found, in the discussion on Wordsworth and Byron, that Wordsworth, and all which that name implies, "belonged" to me as much as to him and his friends. The failure of his health soon scattered all his plans of life, and compelled him to live at a distance from London, so that after the first year or two of our acquaintance, we only saw each other at distant intervals. But (as he said himself in one of his letters to Carlyle) when we did meet it was like brothers. Though he was never, in the full sense of the word, a profound thinker, his openness of mind, and the moral courage in which he greatly surpassed Maurice, made him outgrow the dominion which Maurice and Coleridge had once exercised over his intellect; though he retained to the last a great but discriminating admiration of both, and towards Maurice a warm affection. Except in that short and transitory phase of his life, during which he made the mistake of becoming a clergyman, his mind was ever progressive: and the advance he always seemed to have made when I saw him after an interval, made me apply to him what Goethe said of Schiller, "er hatte eine fürchtliche Fortschreitung." He and I started from intellectual points almost as wide apart as the poles, but the distance between us was always diminishing: if I made steps towards some of his opinions, he, during his short life, was constantly approximating more and more to several of mine: and if he had lived, and had health and vigour to prosecute his ever assiduous self-culture, there is no knowing how much further this spontaneous assimilation might have proceeded.

我和罗巴克越来越疏远了，却开始和协会里面我们柯尔律治派的对手——弗雷德里克·莫里斯和约翰·斯特林——走得越来越近，两人后来都很出名，前者是由于他的著作，后者是由于黑尔和卡莱尔给他写的传记。这两个朋友中，莫里斯是位思想家，而斯特林是位演说家，还是热情洋溢的思想评论员，当时他阐述的思想几乎全都是莫里斯为他塑造的。有一阵子我曾通过艾顿·图克与莫里斯相识（他们俩是在剑桥认识的），尽管我和他之间的讨论几乎总是争论，但我还是从中得到很多东西，帮助构建我的新思想，就像我那些年读柯尔律治、歌德和其他德国作家的著作受益很多一样。我非常尊敬莫里斯的品格和意志，还有他伟大的智力天赋，与我很乐意能给予他的称赞相比，如果我说了些可能不足以显示他的杰出的话，那也不是我情愿的。但我总觉得，莫里斯比我任何同辈人浪费的智力都要多。当然，也几乎没人有那么多可以浪费的智力。他有强大的概括能力，罕见的独创性和辨别能力，能广泛地领悟重要却不明显的真理，但他没有用来在伟大的思想主题上提出更好的东西，以代替大量无价值的陈腐观点，而是用来向自己证明，英国国教从一开始就什么都知道，那些真理——教会和正统观念因它们而受到攻击（其中有很多他和别人看得一样清楚）——不仅和三十九信条一致，而且在这些条款中这些真理被理解和阐释得比任何反对它们的人做得都好。对此我从来都没能找到任何其他解释，除了把它归因于良心上的胆怯和性格上的天生敏感，这经常迫使天赋极高的人接受天主教，因为与他们从自己的判断得出的独立结论相比，他们需要更稳固的支持。任何认识莫里斯的人，都永远不会想要把更庸俗的胆怯归咎于他，即使他没有通过采取和一些通常被认为正统的观点最终爆发冲突，并发起高尚的基督教社会主义运动的手段以此向公众证明自己没有这种胆怯。从精神角度来看，与他最类似的人物是柯尔律治，不去看诗歌天赋，仅从智力上讲的话，我想他明显比柯尔律治更出众。然而这时，他可能会被描述为柯尔律治的追随者，而斯特林则被描述为柯尔律治和他的追随者。我的旧观点正在经历的改变给了我一些与他们接触的机会。莫里斯和斯特林两人都对我的发展起到了重要作用。我和斯特林很快就成了密友，我对他比曾经对任何人都更加热爱。他确实是个非常可爱的人。他性格坦率，热忱，深情又开朗。热爱显现于最高尚和最平凡东西中的真理。他的性情慷慨大方，热情洋溢，这也给他所采纳的观点染上了冲动的色彩，但是正如他会向他认为的对方的错误开战一样，他也能公平地对待所反对的学说和人，他给予自由和义务这两个基本点同样的热爱，他结合了这么多优秀品质，不仅吸引了我，还吸引了所有像我一样了解他的人。他思想开明，胸襟开阔，因此超越了当时我们观点之间的巨大分歧，并和我成为朋友，他一点都不觉得困难。他告诉我他和别人是怎么看我的（道听途说的消息），他们觉得我是“人造的”或机器制造的人，身上刻着别人的观点，而我只能机械地复制。但当他和我讨论华兹华斯和拜伦的时候，发现华兹华斯以及这个名字意味着的一切像属于他和他的朋友一样也“属于”我时，他的感情发生了多大的变化啊。健康的衰退很快打碎了他所有的人生规划，迫使他住到离伦敦较远的地方，因此，在我们认识了一两年之后，我们只能间隔很长时间才能见一次面了。但是（就像他在给卡莱尔的某封信中说的），我们见面的时候就像兄弟一样。尽管他从来都不是一个造诣很深的思想家（从思想家这个词的完整意义来讲），但他思想开阔，而且在勇气上远远超过莫里斯，这让他超越了莫里斯和柯尔律治对他智力上的支配。尽管他直到最后还保持着对这两个人强烈但有判断的崇拜，尤其是对莫里斯是种热烈的喜爱。在他的一生中，除了那一段很短暂的时间他错误地成为牧师之外，他的思想一直都在进步，每次在间隔一段时间后见到他时，他似乎总能让我看到这种进步，这让我把歌德评价席勒的话用在他身上，“他的进步真的是突飞猛进”。我和他认识的时候，两人思想上的距离几乎像两极一样远，但是我们之间的距离总是在缩小。我向着他的某些观点靠近了，他在自己短暂的一生中，也经常越来越接近我的好几个观点。如果他还活着，健康和精力还允许他不断地刻苦自学的话，真不知道这种自然的同化会进行到什么程度。

After 1829 I withdrew from attendance on the Debating Society. I had had enough of speech-making, and was glad to carry on my private studies and meditations without any immediate call for outward assertion of their results. I found the fabric of my old and taught opinions giving way in many fresh places, and I never allowed it to fall to pieces, but was incessantly occupied in weaving it anew. I never, in the course of my transition, was content to remain, for ever so short a time, confused and unsettled. When I had taken in any new idea, I could not rest till I had adjusted its relation to my old opinions, and ascertained exactly how far its effect ought to extend in modifying or superseding them.

1829年以后，我不再出席辩论学会。我已经作了足够多的演讲，很高兴去继续我的自学和沉思，而且不需要立刻公布它们的结果。我发现自己以前学来的观念结构在很多新地方垮掉了，但我从来不允许它破碎，而总是忙着重新编织。在我思想转变的过程中，我从来不会满足于困惑和疑虑的状态，即使这么短的时间也不行。在接受任何新观点时，只有调整好它和我的旧观点的关系，并确定它在修改或取代旧观点的时候到底应该发挥多大的作用之后，我才能安心。

The conflicts which I had so often had to sustain in defending the theory of government laid down in Bentham's and my father's writings, and the acquaintance I had obtained with other schools of political thinking, made me aware of many things which that doctrine, professing to be a theory of government in general, ought to have made room for, and did not. But these things, as yet, remained with me rather as corrections to be made in applying the theory to practice, than as defects in the theory. I felt that politics could not be a science of specific experience; and that the accusations against the Benthamic theory of being a theory, of proceeding à priori by way of general reasoning, instead of Baconian experiment, shewed complete ignorance of Bacon's principles, and of the necessary conditions of experimental investigation. At this juncture appeared in the Edinburgh Review, Macaulay's famous attack on my father's Essay on Government. This gave me much to think about. I saw that Macaulay's conception of the logic of politics was erroneous; that he stood up for the empirical mode of treating political phenomena, against the philosophical; that even in physical science, his notion of philosophizing might have recognized Kepler4, but would have excluded Newton and Laplace5. But I could not help feeling, that though the tone was unbecoming (an error for which the writer, at a later period, made the most ample and honorable amends), there was truth in several of his strictures on my father's treatment of the subject; that my father's premises were really too narrow, and included but a small number of the general truths, on which, in politics, the important consequences depend. Identity of interest between the governing body and the community at large, is not, in any practical sense which can be attached to it, the only thing on which good government depends; neither can this identity of interest be secured by the mere conditions of election. I was not at all satisfied with the mode in which my father met the criticisms of Macaulay. He did not, as I thought he ought to have done, justify himself by saying, "I was not writing a scientific treatise on politics. I was writing an argument for parliamentary reform." He treated Macaulay's argument as simply irrational; an attack upon the reasoning faculty; an example of the saying of Hobbes, that when reason is against a man, a man will be against reason. This made me think that there was really something more fundamentally erroneous in my father's conception of philosophical method, as applicable to politics, than I had hitherto supposed there was. But I did not at first see clearly what the error might be. At last it flashed upon me all at once in the course of other studies. In the early part of 1830 I had begun to put on paper the ideas on Logic (chiefly on the distinctions among Terms, and the import of Propositions) which had been suggested and in part worked out in the morning conversations already spoken of. Having secured these thoughts from being lost, I pushed on into the other parts of the subject, to try whether I could do anything further towards clearing up the theory of Logic generally. I grappled at once with the problem of Induction, postponing that of Reasoning, on the ground that it is necessary to obtain premises before we can reason from them. Now, Induction is mainly a process for finding the causes of effects: and in attempting to fathom the mode of tracing causes and effects in physical science, I soon saw that in the more perfect of the sciences, we ascend, by generalization from particulars, to the tendencies of causes considered singly, and then reason downward from those separate tendencies, to the effect of the same causes when combined. I then asked myself, what is the ultimate analysis of this deductive process; the common theory of the syllogism evidently throwing no light upon it. My practice (learnt from Hobbes and my father) being to study abstract principles by means of the best concrete instances I could find, the Composition of Forces, in dynamics, occurred to me as the most complete example of the logical process I was investigating. On examining, accordingly, what the mind does when it applies the principle of the Composition of Forces, I found that it performs a simple act of addition. It adds the separate effect of the one force to the separate effect of the other, and puts down the sum of these separate effects as the joint effect. But is this a legitimate process? In dynamics, and in all the mathematical branches of physics, it is; but in some other cases, as in chemistry, it is not; and I then recollected that something not unlike this was pointed out as one of the distinctions between chemical and mechanical phenomena, in the introduction to that favorite of my boyhood, Thomson's System of Chemistry. This distinction at once made my mind clear as to what was perplexing me in respect to the philosophy of politics. I now saw, that a science is either deductive or experimental, according as, in the province it deals with, the effects of causes when conjoined, are or are not the sums of the effects which the same causes produce when separate. It followed that politics must be a deductive science. It thus appeared, that both Macaulay and my father were wrong; the one in assimilating the method of philosophizing in politics to the purely experimental method of chemistry; while the other, though right in adopting a deductive method, had made a wrong selection of one, having taken as the type of deduction, not the appropriate process, that of the deductive branches of natural philosophy, but the inappropriate one of pure geometry, which, not being a science of causation at all, does not require or admit of any summing-up of effects. A foundation was thus laid in my thoughts for the principal chapters of what I afterwards published On the Logic of the Moral Sciences; and my new position in respect to my old political creed, now became perfectly definite.

在为边沁和我父亲著作中的政府理论辩护时我经常必须面对的一些冲突，以及对其他政治思想学派的了解，使我意识到那个自称政府概论的学说本应腾出空间说明但却没有说明的很多事情。但是到那时为止，我仍然认为这些事情是把理论应用于实践时要作的修正，而不是理论本身的缺陷。我觉得，政治学不应该是特定经验的科学。有人谴责功利主义理论不是44理论，谴责它用一般性的推理得出理论，而不用培根的实验方法，这显示了他们完全不了解培根原则和实证研究的必要条件。在这个当口上，《爱丁堡评论》上发表了麦考利攻击我父亲《论政府》的著名文章。这件事让我思考了很多。我知道麦考利的政治学逻辑的观念是错误的，他支持用经验主义的方法对待政治现象，反对用哲学方法；甚至在自然科学上，他的哲学探讨观念可能和开普勒的一致，但会排除牛顿和拉普拉斯。然而我还是感觉到，尽管他的语气不得体（后来作者对这个错误作了非常充分、可敬的改正），但是他在这个问题上对父亲的好几处责难还是有道理的。父亲的前提的确太狭窄了，只包含了政治学中的重要结论所依据的一小部分普遍真理。统治集团和整个社会的利益一致，在任何实际意义上，都不是善政依赖的唯一条件。这种利益一致也不能仅通过选举制度得到确保。我根本不满意父亲处理麦考利的批评的方式。他没有像我想象的那样，通过说“我不是在写一篇政治学的学术论文，我是在为议会改革作论证”来证明自己是正确的。他认为麦考利的论证完全不合理，是对推理才能的攻击，也例证了霍布斯的一句名言：当理性无视人的时候，人也会无视理性。这让我觉得，与我先前认为的相比，父亲的哲学方法观念应用在政治学上确实存在更根本性的错误。但是起初，我并没有看清楚错误可能是什么。最后，我在学习其他东西的时候忽然想起来了。1830年初，我开始把逻辑学的一些观点写下来（主要是术语区分和命题意义），都是在之前提到的上午交谈中提出来的，有一部分也是那时解决的。确保这些想法没有丢失之后，我继续努力探索这个主题的其他部分，试试看能不能更进一步全面地整理逻辑学的理论。我立刻抓住归纳法这个问题，暂时搁置推理问题，因为我们必须先获得前提，然后才能从前提进行推理。目前，归纳法主要是寻找导致结果的原因的过程。在试图弄清楚自然科学中追踪原因和结果的方法时我很快发现，在更完善的科学中我们通过对特殊性的概括，形成了逐一考虑原因的趋势，然后从那些单独的可能性向下推论，找出同样的原因结合起来引起的结果。然后，我问自己，这个推论过程的最终分析是什么？普通的三段论的理论显然没有给出解释。我的做法（从霍布斯和我父亲那里学的）是用我能找到的最好的具体例子，学习抽象的原理，我想起来动力学里的力的合成对我正在研究的逻辑过程来说是最完美的例子。因此，我去研究大脑在应用力的合成原理的时候究竟在做什么，结果发现它只是在进行简单的加法。它把一种力量的单独作用加在另一种力量的单独作用上。但是，这个过程合理吗？在动力学以及物理学的所有精确分支里面，是合理的。但是在其他一些情况下，比如化学，就不合理了。那时我回想起来，在我小时候最喜欢的书——汤姆森《化学系统》的引言中，提到过跟这个类似的情况，并指出这是化学现象和机械现象的一个区别。这个区别立刻让我弄清了政治哲学中让我困惑的是什么东西。我现在明白了，一门科学要么是演绎的，要么是实证的，这取决于其所涉及的领域中，各种原因联合造成的结果和分开造成结果的简单相加是否相同。因此，政治学一定是门演绎的科学。这样看来，麦考利和我父亲都错了。前者把政治学中哲学探讨的方法等同于化学中纯粹的实验方法，而后者尽管采用演绎法是对的，但是选择了错误的演绎法，没有采用适当的自然哲学的演绎法分支，而是选择不适当的纯粹几何学的演绎法分支，这根本就不是因果关系的科学，不需要也不容许对结果作任何概括。这为我后来出版的《论伦理学的逻辑》一书中的主要章节打下了思想基础。我对自己的旧政治信条的新立场现在也非常明确了。

If I am asked what system of political philosophy I substituted for that which, as a philosophy, I had abandoned, I answer, No system: only a conviction that the true system was something much more complex and many-sided than I had previously had any idea of, and that its office was to supply, not a set of model institutions, but principles from which the institutions suitable to any given circumstances might be deduced. The influences of European, that is to say, Continental, thought, and especially those of the reaction of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, were now streaming in upon me. They came from various quarters: from the writings of Coleridge, which I had begun to read with interest even before the change in my opinions; from the Coleridgians with whom I was in personal intercourse; from what I had read of Goethe; from Carlyle's early articles in the Edinburgh and Foreign Reviews, though for a long time I saw nothing in these (as my father saw nothing in them to the last) but insane rhapsody. From these sources, and from the acquaintance I kept up with the French literature of the time, I derived, among other ideas which the general turning upside down of the opinions of European thinkers had brought uppermost, these in particular: That the human mind has a certain order of possible progress, in which some things must precede others, an order which governments and public instructors can modify to some, but not to an unlimited extent: That all questions of political institutions are relative, not absolute, and that different stages of human progress not only will have, but ought to have, different institutions: that government is always either in the hands, or passing into the hands, of whatever is the strongest power in society, and that what this power is, does not depend on institutions, but institutions on it: that any general theory or philosophy of politics supposes a previous theory of human progress, and that this is the same thing with a philosophy of history. These opinions, true in the main, were held in an exaggerated and violent manner by the thinkers with whom I was now most accustomed to compare notes, and who, as usual with a reaction, ignored that half of the truth which the thinkers of the eighteenth century saw. But though, at one period of my progress, I for some time undervalued that great century, I never joined in the reaction against it, but kept as firm hold of one side of the truth as I took of the other. The fight between the nineteenth century and the eighteenth always reminded me of the battle about the shield, one side of which was white and the other black. I marvelled at the blind rage with which the combatants rushed against one another. I applied to them, and to Coleridge himself, many of Coleridge's sayings about half truths; and Goethe's device, "many-sidedness," was one which I would most willingly, at this period, have taken for mine.

如果问我用哪种政治哲学体系代替了已经放弃的哲学，我的回答是没有体系，只是一个信念，相信真正的体系远比我之前知道的更复杂，更多面，它的职责在于提供原则，从这些原则中可以推导出适合任何特定环境的制度，而不是提供一套模范制度。欧洲思想的影响，更确切地说是欧洲大陆思想的影响，尤其是那些19世纪反抗18世纪的思想，现在正在向我涌过来。这些思想来自各个方向：柯尔律治，我甚至在信念改变前就开始兴致勃勃地读他的作品了；与我有私交的柯尔律治派的人；我读过的歌德的作品；卡莱尔在《爱丁堡评论》和《外国评论》上的早期文章，尽管很长时间以来，我在这些文章中除了愚蠢的狂言什么都没看到（我父亲到最后也什么都没看到）。从这些思想来源以及当时我一直熟读的法国文学中，我得出一些看法，它们的重要性由于欧洲思想家的观点被完全颠倒而显现出来，尤其是以下这些：人类大脑对可能的进步有种秩序，在这种秩序之内，有些事情必须先于另一些事情，这种秩序可以由政府和公众指导人员进行一定的修改，但修改是有限度的。政治体制的所有问题都是相对的，不是绝对的，人类进步的不同阶段不仅会有而且应该有不同的体制。政府要么就在社会上最强大的力量手里，要么就会传递到它的手里，至于那个力量是什么，不取决于制度，制度反而要取决于它。任何广义的政治理论或政治哲学都假定先前有一个人类进步的理论，这和历史哲学是一样的。这些大体上正确的观点被现在经常和我交换意见的思想家们以夸张、曲解的方式所持有，并且他们像一般的保守派一样，忽视了18世纪的思想家看到的那一半事实。尽管我在进步的某段时期也有一阵子低估了那个伟大的世纪，但是我从来没有参与过反对它，而是像对待真理的那一面一样，紧紧坚持真理的这一面。19世纪和18世纪之间的斗争让我想起盾牌的战争，它一面是黑的，一面是白的。我惊讶于战士们互相猛攻时所带有的盲目愤怒。我把柯尔律治很多关于半真理的名言用在他们身上，以及柯尔律治本人身上。我此时最愿意把歌德的“多面性”策略当成我自己的策略。

The writers by whom, more than by any others, a new mode of political thinking was brought home to me, were those of the St. Simonian school in France. In 1829 and 1830 I became acquainted with some of their writings. They were then only in the earlier stages of their speculations. They had not yet dressed out their philosophy as a religion, nor had they organized their scheme of Socialism. They were just beginning to question the principle of hereditary property. I was by no means prepared to go with them even this length; but I was greatly struck with the connected view which they for the first time presented to me, of the natural order of human progress; and especially with their division of all history into organic periods and critical periods. During the organic periods (they said) mankind accept with firm conviction some positive creed, claiming jurisdiction over all their actions, and containing more or less of truth and adaptation to the needs of humanity. Under its influence they make all the progress compatible with the creed, and finally outgrow it; when a period follows of criticism and negation, in which mankind lose their old convictions without acquiring any new ones, of a general or authoritative character, except the conviction that the old are false. The period of Greek and Roman polytheism, so long as really believed in by instructed Greeks and Romans, was an organic period, succeeded by the critical or sceptical period of the Greek philosophers. Another organic period came in with Christianity. The corresponding critical period began with the Reformation6, has lasted ever since, still lasts, and cannot altogether cease until a new organic period has been inaugurated by the triumph of a yet more advanced creed. These ideas, I knew, were not peculiar to the St. Simonians; on the contrary, they were the general property of Europe, or at least of Germany and France, but they had never, to my knowledge, been so completely systematized as by these writers, nor the distinguishing characteristics of a critical period so powerfully set forth; for I was not then acquainted with Fichte7's Lectures on The Characteristics of the Present Age. In Carlyle, indeed, I found bitter denunciations of an "age of unbelief," and of the present age as such, which I, like most people at that time, supposed to be passionate protests in favour of the old modes of belief. But all that was true in these denunciations, I thought that I found more calmly and philosophically stated by the St. Simonians. Among their publications, too, there was one which seemed to me far superior to the rest; in which the general idea was matured into something much more definite and instructive. This was an early work of Auguste Comte8, who then called himself, and even announced himself in the title-page as, a pupil of Saint Simon. In this tract M. Comte first put forth the doctrine, which he afterwards so copiously illustrated, of the natural succession of three stages in every department of human knowledge: first, the theological, next the metaphysical, and lastly, the positive stage; and contended, that social science must be subject to the same law; that the feudal and Catholic system was the concluding phase of the theological state of the social science, Protestantism the commencement, and the doctrines of the French Revolution the consummation, of the metaphysical; and that its positive state was yet to come. This doctrine harmonized well with my existing notions, to which it seemed to give a scientific shape. I already regarded the methods of physical science as the proper models for political. But the chief benefit which I derived at this time from the trains of thought suggested by the St. Simonians and by Comte, was, that I obtained a clearer conception than ever before of the peculiarities of an era of transition in opinion, and ceased to mistake the moral and intellectual characteristics of such an era, for the normal attributes of humanity. I looked forward, through the present age of loud disputes but generally weak convictions, to a future which shall unite the best qualities of the critical with the best qualities of the organic periods: unchecked liberty of thought, unbounded freedom of individual action in all modes not hurtful to others; but also, convictions as to what is right and wrong, useful and pernicious, deeply engraven on the feelings by early education and general unanimity of sentiment, and so firmly grounded in reason and in the true exigencies of life, that they shall not, like all former and present creeds, religious, ethical, and political, require to be periodically thrown off and replaced by others.

与其他作家相比，最能使我认识到一个新政治思考方式的作家，是法国的圣西门学派。1829年和1830年，我了解了他们的一些作品。当时，他们还处于思索的初期阶段。他们还没有把自己的哲学装扮成一种信仰，也没有构思社会主义方案。他们只是刚开始质疑世袭财产的原则。我绝对没有准备追随他们，即便只是到这种程度。但是他们第一次呈现给我人类进步自然顺序的连贯观点，给我留下了深刻的印象。尤其是他们把所有历史划分成建制时代和批判时代。在建制时代，（他们说）人类深信不疑地接受一些积极的信条，为他们的所有活动寻求权力，并或多或少地容纳真理和调整以适应人类的需求。在这一信条的影响下，他们实现了和信条兼容的所有进步，并最终舍弃了它。这时，另一个充满批判和否定的时代来临了，在这个时代，人们失去了他们旧的信念，而没有获得任何新的、全面的或权威的信念，只是坚信旧的是错的。希腊和罗马多神教的时代，在受过教育的希腊和罗马人真正信仰它的时间内是个建制时代，接下来是希腊哲学家的批判或怀疑时代。另一个建制时代是应基督教而生的。相应的批判时代从宗教改革开始，从那时起一直持续到现在，在一个新的建制时代以更先进的信条取胜开始之前，这一时代不会完全停止。我知道这些观点并非独属于圣西门学派；相反，它们是整个欧洲的财富，或者至少是德国和法国的。但是就我所知，从来没有人像这些作家那样把它们全面系统化，也没有人像他们一样强有力地提出批判时代的显著特征。因为那时，我还没读过菲希特的演说集《当代特征》。我确实发现卡莱尔激烈地谴责“无信仰的时代”和如今这样一个时代，我和当时的大多数人一样，认为这一时代是支持旧的信仰模式激昂的抗议。但是这些谴责中所有正确的东西，我认为圣西门学派的人陈述得更冷静，更有哲理性。在他们的出版物中，我也发现有一本远比其他的更出众。在这本书里面，总体的观点被展开得更明确，更有启发性。这就是奥古斯特·孔德早期的一个作品，他当时称自己是圣西门的弟子，甚至在扉页上公开这样宣布。在这个小册子里，孔德先生首次提出了他后来加以详细阐述的学说，即人类知识的每个领域都有三个阶段的自然演替——首先是神学的，接下来是形而上学的，最后是实证的阶段。他主张社会科学也必须受相同规律的支配。封建制度和天主教制度是社会科学神学状态的最后阶段，新教是形而上学阶段的开始，法国大革命的理论是它的结束，但实证阶段尚未到来。这个学说和我现有的观念很一致，似乎还显示出了科学性。我已经认为自然科学的方法是政治学的合适模型。但是，这时我从圣西门学派和孔德提出的一连串思考中得到的主要益处是，我比以往任何时候都更清楚地了解了一个过渡时代的特征，不再把这样一个时代的道德和思维特征误认为是人类的正常属性。透过当代喧哗的争论和通常很软弱的信念，我期望未来会结合批判时代和建制时代最好的特性：思想上无拘无束的自由，以及在不损害别人的情况下，个人所有行为方式的极大自由。但是，关于什么是对的，什么是错的，什么是有益的，以及什么是有害的信念，已经通过早期教育和一致的情感深深地铭刻在了感觉之上，并稳固地植根于理智和人生的真正需求中，它们不会像以前和现在所有的宗教、伦理和政治信条一样，需要定期地被抛弃和取而代之。

M. Comte soon left the St. Simonians, and I lost sight of him and his writings for a number of years. But the St. Simonians I continued to cultivate. I was kept au courant of their progress by one of their most enthusiastic disciples, M. Gustave d'Eichthal, who about that time passed a considerable interval in England. I was introduced to their chiefs, Bazard and Enfantin, in 1830; and as long as their public teachings and proselytism continued, I read nearly everything they wrote. Their criticism on the common doctrines of Liberalism seemed to me full of important truth; and it was partly by their writings that my eyes were opened to the very limited and temporary value of the old political economy, which assumes private property and inheritance as indefeasible facts, and freedom of production and exchange as the dernier mot of social improvement. The scheme gradually unfolded by the St. Simonians, under which the labour and capital of society would be managed for the general account of the community, every individual being required to take a share of labour, either as thinker, teacher, artist, or producer, all being classed according to their capacity, and remunerated according to their works, appeared to me a far superior description of Socialism to Owen's. Their aim seemed to me desirable and rational, however their means might be inefficacious; and though I neither believed in the practicability, nor in the beneficial operation of their social machinery, I felt that the proclamation of such an ideal of human society could not but tend to give a beneficial direction to the efforts of others to bring society, as at present constituted, nearer to some ideal standard. I honoured them most of all for what they have been most cried down for—the boldness and freedom from prejudice with which they treated the subject of family, the most important of any, and needing more fundamental alterations than remain to be made in any other great social institution, but on which scarcely any reformer has the courage to touch. In proclaiming the perfect equality of men and women, and an entirely new order of things in regard to their relations with one another, the St. Simonians, in common with Owen and Fourier, have entitled themselves to the grateful remembrance of future generations.

孔德先生很快离开了圣西门学派，有许多年我都没有看到他和他的作品。但是我继续与圣西门学派的人交朋友。他们的一个最热情的拥护者，古斯塔夫·艾希塔尔先生，一直在告知我他们的进展，他当时在英国呆了挺长一段时间。1830年，他把我介绍给他们的领袖巴扎尔和昂方坦。只要他们持续公开发表教义，继续宣传改变宗教信仰，我就会读他们写的几乎所有东西。在我看来，他们对自由主义普遍理论的批评有很多是重要的实情。部分由于他们的作品，我注意到旧的政治经济学价值非常有限，只是暂时性的，它把私有制和继承看成不能废止的事实，把生产和交换自由看成社会进步的灵丹妙药。圣西门学派逐渐阐明的方案是这样的：社会上的劳动力和资本的管理将着眼于社会的整体利益，每一个人都必须分担一定量的劳动，不管是思想家、教师、艺术家，还是生产者，都按照他们的能力分类，按照劳动量分发报酬，在我看来这个方案远比欧文对社会主义的描述更出众。在我看来，他们的目标可取，合理，尽管他们的方法可能不灵。虽然我既不相信他们的社会机器的实用性，也不相信它能有利地运转，但我觉得，宣布这样一个理想的人类社会往往会为努力促使目前这样一种构建的社会更接近某种理想标准的人指明一个有益的方向。我最尊敬他们的地方，正是别人贬低他们的地方——勇敢、毫无偏见地对待家庭问题，家庭问题是最重要的问题，在所有伟大的社会制度中都需要比目前有更多重大的改变，但是几乎没有任何改革家敢于触碰这个问题。在宣布男女完全平等，宣布他们彼此之间关系的全新秩序上，圣西门学派和欧文、傅立叶一样，有资格被后人感激和记住。

In giving an account of this period of my life, I have only specified such of my new impressions as appeared to me, both at the time and since, to be a kind of turning points, marking a definite progress in my mode of thought. But these few selected points give a very insufficient idea of the quantity of thinking which I carried on respecting a host of subjects during these years of transition. Much of this, it is true, consisted in rediscovering things known to all the world, which I had previously disbelieved, or disregarded. But the rediscovery was to me a discovery, giving me plenary possession of the truths, not as traditional platitudes, but fresh from their source: and it seldom failed to place them in some new light, by which they were reconciled with, and seemed to confirm while they modified, the truths less generally known which lay in my early opinions, and in no essential part of which I at any time wavered. All my new thinking only laid the foundation of these more deeply and strongly, while it often removed misapprehension and confusion of ideas which had perverted their effect. For example, during the later returns of my dejection, the doctrine of what is called Philosophical Necessity weighed on my existence like an incubus. I felt as if I was scientifically proved to be the helpless slave of antecedent circumstances; as if my character and that of all others had been formed for us by agencies beyond our control, and was wholly out of our own power. I often said to myself, what a relief it would be if I could disbelieve the doctrine of the formation of character by circumstances; and remembering the wish of Fox respecting the doctrine of resistance to governments, that it might never be forgotten by kings, nor remembered by subjects, I said that it would be a blessing if the doctrine of necessity could be believed by all quoad the characters of others, and disbelieved in regard to their own. I pondered painfully on the subject, till gradually I saw light through it. I perceived, that the word Necessity, as a name for the doctrine of Cause and Effect applied to human action, carried with it a misleading association; and that this ssociation was the operative force in the depressing and paralysing influence which I had experienced: I saw that though our character is formed by circumstances, our own desires can do much to shape those circumstances; and that what is really inspiriting and ennobling in the doctrine of freewill, is the conviction that we have real power over the formation of our own character; that our will, by influencing some of our circumstances, can modify our future habits or capabilities of willing. All this was entirely consistent with the doctrine of circumstances, or rather, was that doctrine itself, properly understood. From that time I drew in my own mind, a clear distinction between the doctrine of circumstances, and Fatalism; discarding altogether the misleading word Necessity. The theory, which I now for the first time rightly apprehended, ceased altogether to be discouraging, and besides the relief to my spirits, I no longer suffered under the burthen, so heavy to one who aims at being a reformer in opinions, of thinking one doctrine true, and the contrary doctrine morally beneficial. The train of thought which had extricated me from this dilemma, seemed to me, in after years, fitted to render a similar service to others; and it now forms the chapter on Liberty and Necessity in the concluding Book of my System of Logic.

叙述我这段时间的生活的时候，我只详细说明了一些新感想，在那以后，这些感想在我看来都是我思考方式确切进步的转折点。但是，在那几年过渡期里，我思考了许多问题，仅选择这么几点，对我的思考量说明得非常不充分。确实，这些思考的很大一部分在于重新发现众所周知的东西，而它们也是我之前怀疑或者忽略的东西。但是，这种重新发现对我来说是种新发现，让我完整地拥有真理，不是传统的陈腔滥调，而是从头到尾全新的真理。而且，这种发现几乎总能给真理带来一些新的角度，通过这种角度，新真理与我早期观念中不广为人知的真理达成一致，并似乎在修改它们的时候肯定了它们，而对这些早期观念中的真理的重要部分，我在任何时候都没动摇过。我所有的新思考只是把这些真理的基础打得更深，更牢固，同时还经常移除贬低它们作用的观点里的误会和混乱。例如，后来在我的沮丧几次复发时，所谓的哲学必然性的理论像梦魇一样压在我的生活中。我觉得自己好像被科学地证明了就是先前环境下无助的奴隶；好像我和其他所有人的性格都是我们控制不了的力量塑造的，完全在我们的掌控能力之外。我经常对自己说，如果我能不相信环境决定性格这一学说的话，将是多么大的安慰啊。我想起福克斯对抵抗政府学说的愿望，即希望它永远不要被国王忘记，也不要被臣民记住，我说如果所有人都相信必然性理论只适用于别人的性格，而不相信也适用于他们自己的性格的话，将是件幸事。我苦苦思索这个问题，终于慢慢从里面看到了眉目。我意识到，必然性这个词，作为应用于人类行为上因果学说的名称，带有使人误解的联想，这个联想就是我以前经历的沮丧和无助的原因。我明白了，尽管我们的性格是环境决定的，但是我们自身的渴望能在很大程度上影响那些环境。自由意志学说里真正令人振奋和崇高的地方，在于坚信在自己性格的塑造上我们有真正的控制力。坚信通过影响周围的一些环境，我们的意志能改变我们未来的习惯或能力。所有这一切都和环境学说完全一致，或者说就是环境学说，只是这次得到了正确的理解。从那时起，我在自己脑海里清晰地区分了环境学说和宿命论；完全抛弃了必要性这个易误解的词。我现在第一次正确理解了这个理论，它不再令人沮丧，除了我的精神痛苦减轻了之外，我也不用再承受认为一个学说是正确的，而相反的学说也对精神有益这个重担之苦，这个担子对于一个志在成为思想改革家的人来说是那么的沉重。把我从这个两难困境中解脱出来的思路，在我看来，在之后的那些年，也适合为其他人提供相似的服务。现在，它成了我的《逻辑学体系》尾卷中“论自由和必然性”那一章。

Again, in politics, though I no longer accepted the doctrine of the Essay on Government as a scientific theory; though I ceased to consider representative democracy as an absolute principle, and regarded it as a question of time, place, and circumstance; though I now looked upon the choice of political institutions as a moral and educational question more than one of material interests, thinking that it ought to be decided mainly by the consideration, what great improvement in life and culture stands next in order for the people concerned, as the condition of their further progress, and what institutions are most likely to promote that; nevertheless, this change in the premises of my political philosophy did not alter my practical political creed as to the requirements of my own time and country. I was as much as ever a Radical and Democrat for Europe, and especially for England. I thought the predominance of the aristocratic classes, the noble and the rich, in the English Constitution, an evil worth any struggle to get rid of; not on account of taxes, or any such comparatively small inconvenience, but as the great demoralizing agency in the country. Demoralizing, first, because it made the conduct of the Government an example of gross public immorality, through the predominance of private over public interests in the State, and the abuse of the powers of legislation for the advantage of classes. Secondly, and in a still greater degree, because the respect of the multitude always attaching itself principally to that which, in the existing state of society, is the chief passport to power; and under English institutions, riches, hereditary or acquired, being the almost exclusive source of political importance; riches, and the signs of riches, were almost the only things really respected, and the life of the people was mainly devoted to the pursuit of them. I thought, that while the higher and richer classes held the power of government, the instruction and improvement of the mass of the people were contrary to the self-interest of those classes, because tending to render the people more powerful for throwing off the yoke: but if the democracy obtained a large, and perhaps the principal share, in the governing power, it would become the interest of the opulent classes to promote their education, in order to ward off really mischievous errors, and especially those which would lead to unjust violations of property. On these grounds I was not only as ardent as ever for democratic institutions, but earnestly hoped that Owenite, St. Simonian, and all other anti-property doctrines might spread widely among the poorer classes; not that I thought those doctrines true, or desired that they should be acted on, but in order that the higher classes might be made to see that they had more to fear from the poor when uneducated, than when educated.

此外，在政治学上，尽管我不再承认《论政府》中的学说是个科学的理论；尽管我不再认为代议制民主是完美的原则，而把它看成时间、地点和环境的问题；尽管我现在更把政治制度的选择看作是道德和教育的问题，而不仅是物质利益的问题，我认为它应该主要由以下考虑决定，即生活和文化中的何种重大进步是相关的人们进一步发展的条件，什么制度最有可能促进这种发展。然而，我的政治哲学前提的变化，并没有改变我符合时代和国家需要的实际政治信念。我仍然是个激进分子和民主主义者，对欧洲来说如此，对英国尤是如此。我认为，在英国宪法中，贵族阶层、贵族和富人的优势是值得尽一切努力摆脱的罪恶。不是由于税金或任何类似的小麻烦，而是因为它是这个国家巨大的腐化力量。说它腐化，首先是因为，它把私人利益置于国家的公共利益之上，滥用立法权力为统治阶级谋利益，从而使政府行为变成低级的公共不道德的样板。其次，在更大程度上是因为大众的尊敬主要缚在了社会当时状态下的权力通行证上。在英国的制度下，财富——不管是世袭的还是后来获得的——几乎是政治影响力的唯一源泉。财富以及财富的标志，几乎是唯一真正受人尊敬的东西，也是人们努力追求的主要目标。我想，只要上流阶层和富有阶层掌握政府权力，教育民众和改善他们的生活就与其私有利益相悖，因为这样容易使人们更有力量摆脱压迫。但是，如果民主政治获得较大的，也许是主要的控制力，那么富裕阶层就可能会有兴趣促进他们的教育，以期避开真正麻烦的错误，尤其是那些会导致不公平地侵害财产的错误。由于这些原因，我不仅一如既往地热心拥护民主的制度，还真心希望欧文主义者、圣西门学派和所有反财产的学说能够在贫穷阶层中广泛传播。不是说我认为这些学说正确，或者希望人们按照它们行动，而是这样可能会让上流社会看到，没受过教育的穷人比受过教育的更值得害怕。

In this frame of mind the French Revolution of July9 found me. It roused my utmost enthusiasm, and gave me, as it were, a new existence. I went at once to Paris, was introduced to Lafayette10, and laid the groundwork of the intercourse I afterwards kept up with several of the active chiefs of the extreme popular party. After my return I entered warmly, as a writer, into the political discussions of the time; which soon became still more exciting, by the coming in of Lord Grey11's Ministry, and the proposing of the Reform Bill. For the next few years I wrote copiously in newspapers. It was about this time that Fonblanque, who had for some time written the political articles in the Examiner, became the proprietor and editor of the paper. It is not forgotten with what verve and talent, as well as fine wit, he carried it on, during the whole period of Lord Grey's Ministry, and what importance it assumed as the principal representative, in the newspaper press, of Radical opinions. The distinguishing character of the paper was given to it entirely by his own articles, which formed at least three-fourths of all the original writing contained in it: but of the remaining fourth I contributed during those years a much larger share than any one else. I wrote nearly all the articles on French subjects, including a weekly summary of French politics, often extending to considerable length; together with many leading articles on general politics, commercial and financial legislation, and any miscellaneous subjects in which I felt interested, and which were suitable to the paper, including occasional reviews of books. Mere newspaper articles on the occurrences or questions of the moment, gave no opportunity for the development of any general mode of thought; but I attempted, in the beginning of 1831, to embody in a series of articles, headed "The Spirit of the Age," some of my new opinions, and especially to point out in the character of the present age, the anomalies and evils characteristic of the transition from a system of opinions which had worn out, to another only in process of being formed. These articles were, I fancy, lumbering in style, and not lively or striking enough to be at any time acceptable to newspaper readers; but had they been far more attractive, still, at that particular moment, when great political changes were impending, and engrossing all minds, these discussions were ill-timed, and missed fire altogether. The only effect which I know to have been produced by them, was that Carlyle, then living in a secluded part of Scotland, read them in his solitude, and saying to himself (as he afterwards told me) "Here is a new Mystic," inquired on coming to London that autumn respecting their authorship; an inquiry which was the immediate cause of our becoming personally acquainted.

法国七月革命时我的心境就是这样的。它激起了我最大的热情，可以说给了我一个新的生命。我立刻去了巴黎，被介绍给拉斐德，为我后来与极端民主党派好几个活跃的领袖保持交往打下了基础。回来以后，我以作家身份，热心地加入了当时的政治讨论。由于格雷勋爵内阁的组成以及《改革法案》的提议，讨论很快变得更加令人兴奋。接下来几年，我为报纸写了大量的文章。差不多这时，曾经有一段时间为《检察报》写政论的方布兰克，成了这个报纸的所有者和主编。人们到现在也不会忘记，在格雷勋爵内阁期间，方布兰克是带着什么样的魄力和才干以及杰出的智慧坚持办报的，也不会忘记《检察报》作为激进主义观点的主要代表在报界获得的重要性。这个报纸出色的特质全都是方布兰克自己的文章所赋予的，几乎占了该报所有原创作品的四分之三。但是另外的四分之一，我那些年的投稿比其他任何人都多。有关法国问题的所有文章几乎都是我写的，包括每周一次的法国政治总览，这些文章经常写得很长。还有很多社论，评论一般政治、商业和财政立法以及我感兴趣又适合报纸刊登的各种各样的主题，包括偶尔的书评。仅仅就当时的事件和问题写报纸文章，提供不了发展任何总体思考方式的机会。但是在1831年初，我尝试在以《时代的精神》为题的一系列文章中，具体地表达我的一些新观点，尤其是要指出当代特征中的畸形和罪恶，它们是从一个已经破败的观念体系过渡到另一个尚在形成中体系时的显著特征。我认为这些文章风格拖沓，不够活泼鲜明，在任何时候都难让报纸的读者接受。但是，即便他们更有吸引力，这些讨论的时机仍然不对，完全达不到预想的效果，因为在那个特殊时刻，伟大的政治变革即将发生，吸引了所有人的全部注意力。我知道它们只对卡莱尔产生了影响，他当时住在苏格兰一个偏僻的地方，独自一人读了这些文章后，他对自己说（正如之后他告诉我的那样）“这是个新神秘主义者”，那年秋天去伦敦的时候，他就打听它们的作者是谁。这次打听是我们私下里成为好朋友的直接原因。

I have already mentioned Carlyle's earlier writings as one of the channels through which I received the influences which enlarged my early narrow creed; but I do not think that those writings, by themselves, would ever have had any effect on my opinions. What truths they contained, though of the very kind which I was already receiving from other quarters, were presented in a form and vesture less suited than any other to give them access to a mind trained as mine had been. They seemed a haze of poetry and German metaphysics, in which almost the only clear thing was a strong animosity to most of the opinions which were the basis of my mode of thought; religious scepticism, utilitarianism, the doctrine of circumstances, and the attaching any importance to democracy, logic, or political economy. Instead of my having been taught anything, in the first instance, by Carlyle, it was only in proportion as I came to see the same truths, through media more suited to my mental constitution, that I recognized them in his writings. Then, indeed, the wonderful power with which he put them forth made a deep impression upon me, and I was during a long period one of his most fervent admirers; but the good his writings did me, was not as philosophy to instruct, but as poetry to animate. Even at the time when our acquaintance commenced, I was not sufficiently advanced in my new modes of thought, to appreciate him fully; a proof of which is, that on his shewing me the manuscript of Sartor Resartus, his best and greatest work, which he had just then finished, I made little of it; though when it came out about two years afterwards in Fraser's Magazine, I read it with enthusiastic admiration and the keenest delight. I did not seek and cultivate Carlyle less on account of the fundamental differences in our philosophy. He soon found out that I was not "another mystic," and when for the sake of my own integrity I wrote to him a distinct profession of all those of my opinions which I knew he most disliked, he replied that the chief difference between us was that I "was as yet consciously nothing of a mystic." I do not know at what period he gave up the expectation that I was destined to become one; but though both his and my opinions underwent in subsequent years considerable changes, we never approached much nearer to each other's modes of thought than we were in the first years of our acquaintance. I did not, however, deem myself a competent judge of Carlyle. I felt that he was a poet, and that I was not; that he was a man of intuition, which I was not; and that as such, he not only saw many things long before me, which I could only when they were pointed out to me, hobble after and prove, but that it was highly probable he could see many things which were not visible to me even after they were pointed out. I knew that I could not see round him, and could never be certain that I saw over him; and I never presumed to judge him with any definiteness, until he was interpreted to me by one greatly the superior of us both—who was more a poet than he, and more a thinker than I—whose own mind and nature included his, and infinitely more.

我已经提到过，卡莱尔的早期作品是促使我扩展早先狭隘信念的因素之一。但是我认为，单凭那些著作永远也不会对我的观点有任何影响。作品中包含的真理，尽管跟我从其他地方接受到的一样，但是表现形式比其他真理都更不适合进入一个受过我那种训练的大脑。它们似乎是模糊的诗歌和德国式的形而上学，里面唯一清晰的东西就是对作为我思考方式基础的大部分观点的强烈敌视。如宗教怀疑主义、功利主义、环境学说，以及对民主、逻辑学或政治经济学的任何重视。起初，我并没有从卡莱尔那里学到任何东西，只是随着我通过更适合我心理框架的媒介看到相同的真理时，我才从他的著作中辨别出这些真理。他提出真理时所带有的奇妙力量当时确实给我留下了深刻的印象，在很长一段时间以来，我一直是他最热烈的崇拜者之一。但是，他的作品给我的益处，不是作为哲学教导我，而是作为诗歌激励了我。即使到我们开始认识的时候，我的新思考方式也还不够先进，无法充分欣赏他的作品。一个证据就是他给我看他刚刚完成的最好、最伟大的作品《衣裳哲学》的手稿时，我还读不懂。然而，差不多两年后，它发表在了《弗雷泽杂志》上，我再读的时候就带着热烈的崇拜和最强烈的喜悦了。我们观点中的重大分歧并未阻止我追随卡莱尔，与他交朋友。他很快发现，我并不是“另一个神秘主义者”，为了表示自己的诚意，我给他写了封信，清楚地表明了我所有他最不喜欢的观点，他回复说，我们之间的主要区别在于，我“至今还不是自觉的神秘主义者”。我不知道他到什么时候不再期盼我注定会成为神秘主义者。但是，尽管我们两个人的观点在接下来的几年里都经历了很大的变化，我们的思考方式并没比我们认识的最初几年更靠近一些。然而，我认为自己不能胜任评价卡莱尔的工作。我觉得他是个诗人，而我不是；他是个富有直觉的人，而我不是。同样地，他不仅能在我之前很久就明白很多东西，而我只能在别人把它们指出后才蹒跚跟随并去证明，而且他能明白的很多东西很可能即使在被指出来后，我仍然不明白。我知道我无法了解他在想什么，也永远不能肯定能看透他。我从不相信自己能明确地评价他，除非有一个远比我们两人都更出众的人给我解释以后才可以——那个人比他更有诗才，比我更有思想——这个人在思想和性情上要远远比他更丰富。

Among the persons of intellect whom I had known of old, the one with whom I had now most points of agreement was the elder Austin. I have mentioned that he always set himself in opposition to our early sectarianism; and latterly he had, like myself, come under new influences. Having been appointed Professor of Jurisprudence in the London University (now University College), he had lived for some time at Bonn to study for his Lectures; and the influences of German literature and of the German character and state of society had made a very perceptible change in his views of life. His personal disposition was much softened; he was less militant and polemic; his tastes had begun to turn themselves towards the poetic and contemplative. He attached much less importance than formerly to outward changes; unless accompanied by a better cultivation of the inward nature. He had a strong distaste for the general meanness of English life, the absence of enlarged thoughts and unselfish desires, the low objects on which the faculties of all classes of the English are intent. Even the kind of public interests which Englishmen care for, he held in very little esteem. He thought that there was more practical good government, and (which is true enough) infinitely more care for the education and mental improvement of all ranks of the people, under the Prussian monarchy, than under the English representative government: and he held, with the French Economists, that the real security for good government is "un peuple éclairé," which is not always the fruit of popular institutions, and which if it could be had without them, would do their work better than they. Though he approved of the Reform Bill, he predicted, what in fact occurred, that it would not produce the great immediate improvements in government, which many expected from it. The men, he said, who could do these great things, did not exist in the country. There were many points of sympathy between him and me, both in the new opinions he had adopted and in the old ones which he retained. Like me, he never ceased to be an utilitarian, and with all his love of the Germans, and enjoyment of their literature, never became in the smallest degree reconciled to the innate-principle metaphysics. He cultivated more and more a kind of German religion, a religion of poetry and feeling with little, if anything of positive dogma; while, in politics (and here it was that I most differed with him) he acquired an indifference, bordering on contempt, for the progress of popular institutions: though he rejoiced in that of Socialism, as the most effectual means of compelling the powerful classes to educate the people, and to impress on them the only real means of permanently improving their material condition, a limitation of their numbers. Neither was he, at this time, fundamentally opposed to Socialism in itself as an ultimate result of improvement. He professed great disrespect for what he called "the universal principles of human nature of the political economists," and insisted on the evidence which history and daily experience afford of the "extraordinary pliability of human nature" (a phrase which I have somewhere borrowed from him); nor did he think it possible to set any positive bounds to the moral capabilities which might unfold themselves in mankind, under an enlightened direction of social and educational influences. Whether he retained all these opinions to the end of life I know not. Certainly the modes of thinking of his later years and especially of his last publication were much more Tory in their general character, than those which he held at this time.

在我很久以前就认识的有识之士中，现在和我一致意见最多的是年长的奥斯丁。我提到过，他总是反对我们早期的宗派主义。后来，他和我一样受到新的影响。他被任命为伦敦大学（现在的伦敦大学学院）的法学教授之后，为了讲课做研究而在波恩住了一段时间。德国文学、德国人性格和社会状态的影响，使他的人生观产生了很明显的变化。他的性情温和了很多，没那么好斗爱争辩了，他开始转向爱好诗歌和沉思。他不再像以前一样那么重视外部变化，除非与此同时，内部性情也得到更好的陶冶。英国人的生活普遍很自私，缺乏宽广的思想和无私的愿望，还有英国所有阶层热衷的卑微目标，他都特别讨厌。即便对英国人关心的那种公共利益，他也不太瞧得起。他认为，普鲁士君主政体比英国的代议制政府实行了更多实际的善政（这是真的），更关心所有阶层人民的教育和思想进步。和法国《经济学人》的观点一样，他认为真正确保善政的是“见多识广的民众”，不一定是民主制度的成果。但如果没有这种制度也能有这些人的话，他们就会比这种制度更能发挥作用。尽管他赞成《改革法案》，但他还是预言，在治理上它不会产生很多人期盼的那种重大的直接的进步，事实上也确实如此。他说，这个国家不存在能做这些伟大事情的人。不管在他采纳的新观点上，还是在他保留的旧观点上，我和他之间都有很多共鸣。和我一样，他一直都是个功利主义者，他热爱德国人，喜欢他们的文学，但他从来都没有接受先天原则的形而上学，一点都没有接受。他日益培养出一种德国信仰，一种诗歌和感觉的信仰，但明确的信条却很少（如果有的话）。而在政治上（这是我和他最不同的地方），他不关心大众制度的进步，几乎是轻视它。但是他很高兴地看到，要迫使权力阶层去教育民众，并让他们记住永久改进他们物质条件的唯一真正的方法是限制他们的数量，社会主义是最有效的方法。这时，他也没有从根本上反对完全把社会主义当作进步的最终结果。他非常蔑视他所谓的“政治经济学家的人性普遍原则”，并坚持那些历史和日常经验提供的“人性的非凡适应性”的证据（这个短语是我在某处从他那里借用的）。他还认为，即便在社会和教育影响的开明指导下，也不可能给可能会在人类身上展现的道德能力设下任何绝对的限度。我不知道他是否直到生命的尽头还保持着这些观点。当然，他晚年的思考方式，尤其是他最后出版的作品，从总体特征上看比这时更加保守。

My father's tone of thought and feeling, I now felt myself at a great distance from: greater, indeed, than a full and calm explanation and reconsideration on both sides, might have shewn to exist in reality. But my father was not one with whom calm and full explanations on fundamental points of doctrine could be expected, at least with one whom he might consider as, in some sort, a deserter from his standard. Fortunately we were almost always in strong agreement on the political questions of the day, which engrossed a large part of his interest and of his conversation. On those matters of opinion on which we differed, we talked little. He knew that the habit of thinking for myself, which his mode of education had fostered, sometimes led me to opinions different from his, and he perceived from time to time that I did not always tell him how different. I expected no good, but only pain to both of us, from discussing our differences: and I never expressed them but when he gave utterance to some opinion or feeling repugnant to mine, in a manner which would have made it disingenuousness on my part to remain silent.

我现在觉得自己和父亲的思考和情感风格相差很远。真的比双方都进行全面平静的说明和斟酌后能看出来的在现实中存在的差别还要大。但是，不能期待我父亲会平静、全面地解释学说的基本要点，至少不会和一个在他看来，可能在某种程度上抛弃了他的标准的人这样解释。幸运的是，在当前的政治问题上，我们几乎总是强烈的一致，而政治问题是他非常感兴趣的，占据了他谈话的主要内容。对于我们观点不一致的事情，我们谈得很少。他知道，他的教育方式培养了我自主思考的习惯，让我有时会持和他不同的观点，他时常觉察到我不总是告诉他我们的观点怎么不同。我知道，讨论我们的分歧不会对我们两个有任何好处，只会产生痛苦；我从来没有表示过这些分歧，除非他表达一些与我不一致的观点或感觉的方式，让我觉得如果保持沉默就会显得无诚意的时候才会这么做。

It remains to speak of what I wrote during these years, which, independently of my contributions to newspapers, was considerable. In 1830 and 1831 I wrote the five Essays since published under the title of Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy, almost as they now stand, except that in 1833 I partially rewrote the fifth Essay. They were written with no immediate purpose of publication; and when, some years later, I offered them to a publisher, he declined them. They were only printed in 1844, after the success of the System of Logic. I also resumed my speculations on this last subject, and puzzled myself, like others before me, with the great paradox of the discovery of new truths by general reasoning. As to the fact, there could be no doubt. As little could it be doubted, that all reasoning is resolvable into syllogisms, and that in every syllogism the conclusion is actually contained and implied in the premises. How, being so contained and implied, it could be new truth, and how the theorems of geometry, so different in appearance from the definitions and axioms, could be all contained in these, was a difficulty which no one, I thought, had sufficiently felt, and which at all events no one had succeeded in clearing up. The explanations offered by Whately and others, though they might give a temporary satisfaction, always, in my mind, left a mist still hanging over the subject. At last, when reading a second or third time the chapters on Reasoning in the second volume of Dugald Stewart, interrogating myself on every point, and following out, as far as I knew how, every topic of thought which the book suggested, I came upon an idea of his respecting the use of axioms in ratiocination, which I did not remember to have before noticed, but which now, in meditating on it, seemed to me not only true of axioms, but of all general propositions whatever, and to be the key of the whole perplexity. From this germ grew the theory of the Syllogism propounded in the second Book of the Logic; which I immediately fixed by writing it out. And now, with greatly increased hope of being able to produce a work on Logic, of some originality and value, I proceeded to write the First Book, from the rough and imperfect draft I had already made. What I now wrote became the basis of that part of the subsequent Treatise; except that it did not contain the Theory of Kinds, which was a later addition, suggested by otherwise inextricable difficulties which met me in my first attempt to work out the subject of some of the concluding chapters of the Third Book. At the point which I have now reached I made a halt, which lasted five years. I had come to the end of my tether; I could make nothing satisfactory of Induction, at this time. I continued to read any book which seemed to promise light on the subject, and appropriated, as well as I could, the results; but for a long time I found nothing which seemed to open to me any very important vein of meditation.

我还应该谈谈这些年我写的东西，除了给报纸的投稿之外，还有很多。1830年和1831年，我写了五篇论文，后来以《论政治经济学中一些未处理的问题》的书名出版，除了在1833年的时候我改写了第五篇的一部分外，其他的基本和现在见到的一样。写这些论文的时候没打算要立刻发表。几年后，当我把它们拿给一位出版商时，却被他拒绝了。1844年《逻辑学体系》一书成功后，它们才得以发表。我也继续思考逻辑学这个主题，和前人一样，对于通过一般的推理就能发现新真理这个似乎矛盾的观点，我也很迷惑。至于事实，则毋庸置疑。就像所有的推理都可以分解成三段论法，在每个三段论法中，结论实际上包含和隐含在前提里面，这没什么可怀疑的。结论被这样包含和隐含着，怎么能是新真理。几何学的定理，表面上看与定义和公理如此不同，怎么会包含在它们里面。我想，这个困难是谁都没有充分感觉到的，也还没有被成功解释清楚过。惠特利和其他人提供的解释尽管可以让人暂时满意，但在我心中总是还有一团迷雾笼罩在这个问题上。终于，在第二遍或第三遍读杜格尔·斯图尔特第二卷中论推理的章节时，我在每个点上都提问自己，并且尽可能地把书中提出的每个思想主题追查到底，我突然想起他说过在推理中用公理，我记得以前没注意过，但是现在，在思索这个问题的时候，我觉得不仅公理可以用在推理中，而且所有普通的命题都可以，这似乎是解开整个困惑的关键。这个萌芽发展成了三段论的理论，在《逻辑学体系》的第二卷里提了出来。通过把它写下来，我迅速把这个理论确定了下来。现在，我更加希望能创作一部新颖、有价值的逻辑学作品，我从以前粗糙、不完善的手稿着手，开始写第一卷。我现在所写的东西，成了随后的论文中相应部分的基础。只是不包括后来加上去的《类别理论》，那是我草拟第三卷最后几章的题目碰到困难时想出来的，要是没有类别理论这些困难就无法解决。在我现在到达的这个关头上，我停了下来，一停就是五年。我已经到了极限了。此时，我无法写出任何让人满意的关于归纳法的文章。我继续读任何看起来有希望为归纳法提供一线光亮的书籍，尽量利用它们的成果。但是在很长一段时间里，我没找到任何能给我提供非常重要思路的东西。

In 1832 I wrote several papers for the first series of Tait's Magazine, and one for a quarterly periodical called the Jurist, which had been founded, and for a short time carried on, by a set of friends, all lawyers and law reformers, with several of whom I was acquainted. The paper in question is the one on the rights and duties of the State respecting Corporation and Church Property, now standing first among the collected Dissertations and Discussions; where one of my articles in Tait, "The Currency Juggle," also appears. In the whole mass of what I wrote previous to these, there is nothing of sufficient permanent value to justify reprinting. The paper in the Jurist, which I still think a very complete discussion of the rights of the State over Foundations, shewed both sides of my opinions, asserting as firmly as I should have done at any time, the doctrine that all endowments are national property, which the government may and ought to control; but not, as I should once have done, condemning endowments in themselves, and proposing that they should be taken to pay off the national debt. On the contrary, I urged strenuously the importance of having a provision for education, not dependent on the mere demand of the market, that is, on the knowledge and discernment of average parents, but calculated to establish and keep up a higher standard of instruction than is likely to be spontaneously demanded by the buyers of the article. All these opinions have been confirmed and strengthened by the whole course of my subsequent reflections.

1832年，我在《泰特杂志》的第一辑上写了好几篇文章，还给一个叫《法学家》的季刊写了一篇，这本季刊是由一帮朋友创立并经营了短暂的一段时间，他们都是律师和法律改革家，我和其中好几个很熟。这里说的这篇文章，是关于国家在社团和教会财产上的权利和义务的，现在被收录进《论述和讨论》。我发表在《泰特杂志》上的一篇文章《货币骗局》也收录在这里面。在这些文章之前，我写的很多文章，都没有足够永恒的价值使得它们值得再版。我至今仍然认为，《法学家》上的那篇文章，对于国家在基金机构上权利的论述非常完整，表明了我的观点的两个方面：一方面，我跟以往任何时候一样，坚决支持所有捐款都是国家财产的学说，政府可以而且也应该支配这些捐款；另一方面，我不像过去那样谴责捐款本身，还建议用它们偿还国家债务。相反，我极力强调为教育设立基金条款的重要性，教育不能仅依靠市场需求，也就是说不能仅依靠普通父母的了解和眼力，而是要计划好，设立并保持较高的教育标准，比商品购买者自发要求的标准还要高。所有这些见解都在我后来的整个思考过程中得到了证实和加强。