《我的知识之路》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