But agreement ceases as soon as we attempt to define “wisdom” and consider means of promoting it. I want to ask first what wisdom is, and then what can be done to teach it.
There are, I think, several factors that contribute to wisdom. Of these I should put first a sense of proportion: the capacity to take account of all the important factors in a problem and to attach to each its due weight.
This has become more difficult than it used to be owing to the extent and complexity of the specialized knowledge required of various kinds of technicians. Suppose, for example, that you are engaged in research in scientific medicine.
鉴于各类技术员所需的专门知识的范围和复杂程度,这种能力变得比过去更难具备。比如,假设你从事医科。
The work is difficult and is likely to absorb the whole of your intellectual energy. You have not time to consider the effect which your discoveries or inventions may have outside the field of medicine.
You succeed (let us say), as modern medicine has succeeded, in enormously lowering the infant death-rate, not only in Europe and America, but also in Asia and Africa.
你成功了(我们假设),正如现代医学所做到的:婴儿死亡率不仅在欧美而且在亚非也大大降低了。
This has the entirely unintended result of making the food supply inadequate and lowering the standard of life in the most populous parts of the world. To take an even more spectacular example, which is in everybody's mind at the present time:
You study the composition of the atom from a disinterested desire for knowledge, and incidentally place in the hands of powerful lunatics the means of destroying the human race.
你渴望探求知识,不带功利性地去研究原子结构,却意外地将摧毁人类的手段置于狂人手中。
In such ways the pursuit of knowledge may become harmful unless it is combined with wisdom; and wisdom in the sense of comprehensive vision is not necessarily present in specialists in the pursuit of knowledge.