【国外文学】The Book of Life.docx

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1、【国外文学】The Book of LifeINTRODUCTORYThe writer of this book has been in this world some forty-two years. That may not seem long to some, but it is long enough to have made many painful mistakes, and to have learned much from them. Looking about him, he sees others making these same mistakes, suffering

2、 for lack of that same knowledge which he has so painfully acquired. This being the case, it seems a friendly act to offer his knowledge, minus the blunders and the pain.There come to the writer literally thousands of letters every year, asking him questions, some of them of the strangest. A man is

3、dying of cancer, and do I think it can be cured by a fast? A man is unable to make his wife happy, and can I tell him what is the matter with women? A man has invested his savings in mining stock, and can I tell him what to do about it? A man works in a sweatshop, and has only a little time for self

4、-improvement, and will I tell him what books he ought to read? Many such questions every day make one aware of a vast mass of people, earnest, hungry for happiness, and groping as if in a fog. The things they most need to know they are not taught in the schools, nor in the newspapers they read, nor

5、in the church they attend. Of these agencies, the first is not entirely competent, the second is not entirely honest, and the third is not entirely up to date. Nor is there anywhere a book in which the effort has been made to give to everyday human beings the everyday information they need for the s

6、uccessful living of their lives.For the present book the following claims may be made. First, it is a modern book; its writer watches hour by hour the new achievements of the human mind, he reaches out for information about them, he seeks to adjust his own thoughts to them and to test them in his ow

7、n living. Second, it is, or tries hard to be, a wise book; its writer is not among those too-ardent young radicals who leap to the conclusion that because many old things are stupid and tiresome, therefore everything that is old is to be spurned with contempt, and everything that proclaims itself ne

8、w is to be taken at its own valuation. Third, it is an honest book; its writer will not pretend to know what he only guesses, and where it is necessary to guess, he will say so frankly. Finally, it is a kind book; it is not written for its authors glory, nor for his enrichment, but to tell you thing

9、s that may be useful to you in the brief span of your life. It will attempt to tell you how to live, how to find health and happiness and success, how to work and how to play, how to eat and how to sleep, how to love and to marry and to care for your children, how to deal with your fellow men in bus

10、iness and politics and social life, how to act and how to think, what religion to believe, what art to enjoy, what books to read. A large order, as the boys phrase it!There are several ways for such a book to begin. It might begin with the child, because we all begin that way; it might begin with lo

11、ve, because that precedes the child; it might begin with the care of the body, explaining that sound physical health is the basis of all right living, and even of right thinking; it might begin as most philosophies do, by defining life, discussing its origin and fundamental nature.The trouble with t

12、his last plan is that there are a lot of people who have their ideas on life made up in tabloid form; they have creeds and catechisms which they know by heart, and if you suggest to them anything different, they give you a startled look and get out of your way. And then there is another, and in our

13、modern world a still larger class, who say, Oh, shucks! I dont go in for religion and that kind of thing. You offer them something that looks like a sermon, and they turn to the baseball page.Who will read this Book of Life? There will be, among others, the great American tired business man. He wres

14、tles with problems and cares all day, and when he sits down to read in the evening, he says: Make it short and snappy. There is the wife of the tired business man, the American perfect lady. She does most of the reading for the family; but she has never got down to anything fundamental in her life,

15、and mostly she likes to read about exciting love affairs, which she distinguishes from the unexciting kind she knows by the word romance. Then there is the still more tired American workingman, who has been speeded up all day under the bonus system or the piece-work system, and is apt to fall asleep

16、 in his chair before he finishes supper. Then there is the workingmans wife, who has slaved all day in the kitchen, and has a chance for a few minutes intimacy with her husband before he falls asleep. She would like to have somebody tell her what to do for croup, but she is not sure that she has tim

17、e to discuss the question whether life is worth living.Yet, I wonder; is there a single one among all these tired people, or even among the cynical people, who has not had some moment of awe when the thought came stabbing into his mind like a knife: What a strange thing this life is! What am I anyho

18、w? Where do I come from, and what is going to become of me? What do I mean, what am I here for? I have sat chatting with three hoboes by a railroad track, cooking themselves a mulligan in an old can, and heard one of them say: By God, its a queer thing, aint it, mate? I have sat on the deck of a shi

19、p, looking out over the midnight ocean and talking with a sailor, and heard him use almost the identical words. It is not only in the class-room and the schools that the minds of men are grappling with the fundamental problems; in fact, it was not from the schools that the new religions and the grea

20、t moral impulses of humanity took their origin. It was from lonely shepherds sitting on the hillsides, and from fishermen casting their nets, and from carpenters and tailors and shoemakers at their benches.Stop and think a bit, and you will realize it does make a difference what you believe about li

21、fe, how it comes to be, where it is going, and what is your place in it. Is there a heaven with a God, who watches you day and night, and knows every thought you think, and will some day take you to eternal bliss if you obey his laws? If you really believe that, you will try to find out about his la

22、ws, and you will be comparatively little concerned about the success or failure of your business. Perhaps, on the other hand, you have knocked about in the world and lost your faith; you have been cheated and exploited, and have set out to get yours, as the phrase is; to feather your own nest. But s

23、ome gust of passion seizes you, and you waste your substance, you wreck your life; then you wonder, Who set that trap and baited it? Am I a creature of blind instincts, jealousies and greeds and hates beyond my own control entirely? Am I a poor, feeble insect, blown about in a storm and smashed? Or

24、do I make the storm, and can I in any part control it?No matter how busy you may be, no matter how tired you may be, it will pay you to get such things straight: to know a little of what the wise men of the past have thought about them, and more especially what science with its new tools of knowledg

25、e may have discovered.The writer of this book spent nine years of his life in colleges and universities; also he was brought up in a church. So he knows the orthodox teachings, he can say that he has given to the recognized wise men of the world every opportunity to tell him what they know. Then, be

26、ing dissatisfied, he went to the unrecognized teachers, the enthusiasts and the cranks of a hundred schools. Finally, he thought for himself; he was even willing to try experiments upon himself. As a result, he has not found what he claims is ultimate or final truth; but he has what he might describ

27、e as a rough working draft, a practical outline, good for everyday purposes. He is going to have confidence enough in you, the reader, to give you the hardest part first; that is, to begin with the great fundamental questions. What is life, and how does it come to be? What does it mean, and what hav

28、e we to do with it? Are we its masters or its slaves? What does it owe us, and what do we owe to it? Why is it so hard, and do we have to stand its hardness? And can we really know about all these matters, or will we be only guessing? Can we trust ourselves to think about them, or shall we be safer

29、if we believe what we are told? Shall we be punished if we think wrong, and how shall we be punished? Shall we be rewarded if we think right, and will the pay be worth the trouble?Such questions as these I am going to try to answer in the simplest language possible. I would avoid long words altogeth

30、er, if I could; but some of these long words mean certain definite things, and there are no other words to serve the purpose. You do not refuse to engage in the automobile business because the carburetor and the differential are words of four syllables. Neither should you refuse to get yourself stra

31、ight with the universe because it is too much trouble to go to the dictionary and learn that the word phenomenon means something else than a little boy who can play the piano or do long division in his head.CHAPTER ITHE NATURE OF LIFE(Attempts to show what we know about life; to set the bounds of re

32、al truth as distinguished from phrases and self-deception.)If I could, I would begin this book by telling you what Life is. But unfortunately I do not know what Life is. The only consolation I can find is in the fact that nobody else knows either.We ask the churches, and they tell us that male and f

33、emale created He them, and put them in the Garden of Eden, and they would have been happy had not Satan tempted them. But then you ask, who made Satan, and the explanation grows vague. You ask, if God made Satan, and knew what Satan was going to do, is it not the same as if God did it himself? So th

34、is explanation of the origin of evil gets you no further than the Hindoo picture of the world resting on the back of a tortoise, and the tortoise on the head of a snakeand nothing said as to what the snake rests on.Let us go to the scientist. I know a certain physiologist, perhaps the greatest in th

35、e world, and his eager face rises before me, and I hear his quick, impetuous voice declaring that he knows what Life is; he has told it in several big volumes, and all I have to do is to read them. Life is a tropism, caused by the presence of certain combinations of chemicals; my friend knows this,

36、because he has produced the thing in his test-tubes. He is an exponent of a way of thought called Monism, which finds the ultimate source of being in forms of energy manifesting themselves as matter; he shows how all living things arise from that and sink back into it.But question this scientist mor

37、e closely. What is this matter that you are so sure of? How do you know it? Obviously, through sensations. You never know matter itself, you only know its effects upon you, and you assume that the matter must be there to cause the sensation. In other words, matter, which seems so real, turns out to

38、be merely a permanent possibility of sensation. And suppose there were to be sensations, caused, for example, by a sportive demon who liked to make fun of eminent physiologiststhen there might be the appearance of matter and nothing else; in other words, there might be mind, and various states of mi

39、nd. So we discover that the materialist, in the philosophic sense, is making just as large an act of faith, is pronouncing just as bold a dogma as any priest of any religion.This is an old-time topic of disputation. Before Mother Eddy there was Bishop Berkeley, and before Berkeley, there was Plato,

40、and they and the materialists disputed until their hearers cried in despair, What is Mind? No matter! What is Matter? Never mind! But a century or two ago in a town of Prussia there lived a little, dried-up professor of philosophy, who sat himself down in his room and fixed his eyes on a church stee

41、ple outside the window, and for years on end devoted himself to examining the tools of thought with which the human mind is provided, and deciding just what work and how much of it they are fitted to do. So came the proof that our minds are incapable of reaching to or dealing with any ultimate reali

42、ty whatever, but can comprehend only phenomenathat is to say, appearancesand their relations one with another. The Koenigsberg professor proved this once for all time, setting forth four propositions about ultimate reality, and proving them by exact and irrefutable logic, and then proving by equally

43、 exact and irrefutable logic their precise opposites and contraries. Anybody who has read and comprehended the four antinomies of Immanuel KantA knows that metaphysics is as dead a subject as astrology, and that all the complicated theories which the philosophers from Heraclitus to Arthur Balfour ha

44、ve spun like spiders out of their inner consciousness, have no more relation to reality than the intricacies of the game of chess.A See Paulsen: Life of Kant.The writer is sorry to make this statement, because he spent a lot of time reading these philosophers and acquainting himself with their subtl

45、e theories. He learned a whole language of long words, and even the special meanings which each philosopher or school of philosophers give to them. When he had got through, he had learned, so far as metaphysics is concerned, absolutely nothing, and had merely the job of clearing out of his mind grea

46、t masses of verbal cobwebs. It was not even good intellectual training; the metaphysical method of thought is a trap. The person who thinks in absolutes and ultimates is led to believe that he has come to conclusions about reality, when as a matter of fact he has merely proved what he wants to belie

47、ve; if he had wanted to believe the opposite, he could have proven that exactly as wellas his opponents will at once demonstrate.If you multiply two feet by two feet, the result represents a plain surface, or figure of two dimensions. If you multiply two feet by two feet by two feet, you have a soli

48、d, or figure of three dimensionssuch as the world in which we live and move. But now, suppose you multiply two feet by two feet by two feet by two feet, what does that represent? For ages the minds of mathematicians and philosophers have been tempted by this fascinating problem of the fourth dimensi

49、on. They have worked out by analogy what such a world would be like. If you went into this fourth dimension, you could turn yourself inside out, and come back to our present world in that condition, and no one of your three-dimension friends would be able to imagine how you had managed it, or to put you back again the way you belonged. And in this, it seems to me, we have the perfect analogy of metaphysical thinking. It is the fourth dimension of the m