胡适留学日记卷十五四二、寄郑莱书

卷十五四二、寄郑莱书

　　（二月廿一日）

　　…Very often ideas got beyond the control of men and carried men, philosophers, et al., along with it. That ideas have had "an ancestry and posterity of their own"（in the words of Lord Acton）is an indictment against the intellectual passivity and slovenness of mankind. We have allowed ideas to run wild and work disaster to the world. Think of the idea of nationalism…

　　We have succeeded in controling nature, and it is high time for us to think about how to control ideas….

　　The first step in this direction is to find a criterion to test the value of ideas….Ideas must be tested in terms of "the values of life" ….

　　The other step…is to find a way for the control of the fomation of ideas. This I believe to lie in the direction of systematically gathering, interpreting, and diffusing the facts of life. We must have statistics, laboratories, experiment stations, libraries, etc, to furnish us with facts about the real conditions of society, the nation and the world. Without facts no truly workable ideas can be fonned.

　　Heretofore ideas have come from the air, from the "world of ideas". Hereafter, ideas should come from the laboratories….

　　〔中译〕

　　思想常常越出人的控制并转而控制人，哲学家及某些人便往往为思想左右。思想有“祖先和后裔”（引厄克登勋爵语），此一说即是对所谓思想消极和人之无为之力斥。我们的思想也曾近乎疯狂并对世界造成灾难。只要想一想国家主义的思想就够了……

　　人类成功地控制了自然，我们早就该思考如何来控制我们的思想了……

　　这项工作的第一步是寻找到一个衡量思想之价值的标准……思想应以“生命之价值”的标准来检测……

　　第二步……寻找控制思想形成之方法。这一点主要依赖于如何系统地收集、翻译、传播生活之基本知识。我们必须有统计资料、实验室、试验站、图书馆等等，以提供给我们有关社会、国家和世界的其实情况的基本知识，没有这些基本知识我们便无法形成真正切实可行之思想。

　　以往的思想来自虚空，来自“精神的世界”，今后，思想应该来自实验室……

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