胡適留學日記卷十五四二、寄鄭萊書

卷十五四二、寄鄭萊書

　　（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….

　　〔中譯〕

　　思想常常越出人的控制並轉而控制人，哲學家及某些人便往往為思想左右。思想有「祖先和後裔」（引厄克登勳爵語），此一說即是對所謂思想消極和人之無為之力斥。我們的思想也曾近乎瘋狂並對世界造成災難。只要想一想國家主義的思想就夠了……

　　人類成功地控制了自然，我們早就該思考如何來控制我們的思想了……

　　這項工作的第一步是尋找到一個衡量思想之價值的標準……思想應以「生命之價值」的標準來檢測……

　　第二步……尋找控制思想形成之方法。這一點主要依賴於如何系統地收集、翻譯、傳播生活之基本知識。我們必須有統計資料、實驗室、試驗站、圖書館等等，以提供給我們有關社會、國家和世界的其實情況的基本知識，沒有這些基本知識我們便無法形成真正切實可行之思想。

　　以往的思想來自虛空，來自「精神的世界」，今後，思想應該來自實驗室……

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