-By Robert Lynd
The average man who uses a telephone could not explain how a telephone works. He takes for granted the telephone, the railway train, the linotype, the airplane, as our grandfathers took for granted the miracles of the gospels. He neither questions nor understands them. It is as though each of us investigated and made his own only a tiny circle of facts. Knowledge outside the day's work is regarded by most men as a gewgaw.
Still we are constantly in reaction against our ignorance. We rouse ourselves at interval and speculate. We revel in speculations about anything at all-about life after death or about such questions as that which is said to have puzzled Aristoles, "why sneezing from noon to midnight was good, but from night to noon unlucky." One of the greatest joys known to man is to take such a flight into ignorance in search, of knowledge. The great pleasure of ignorance is, after all, the pleasure of asking questions. The man who has lost this pleasure or exchanged it for the pleasure of dogma, which is the pleasure of answering, is already beginning to stiffen.
One envies so inquisitive a man as Jewell, who sat down to the study of physiology in his sixties. Most of us have lost the sense of our ignorance long before that age. We even become vain of our squirrel's hoard of knowledge and regard increasing age itself as a school of omniscience. We forget that Socrates was famed for wisdom not because he was omniscient but because he realized at the age of seventy that he still knew nothing.
参考中文译文
作者：罗伯特·林德
平常人只会使用电话，却不能解释电话的工作原理。他把电话、火车、整行铸造排字机、飞机都看做是自然之事，就像我们的祖父一代听惯了福音赞美书里的奇迹一样。关于这些事，他既不去了解，也不去怀疑。就像我们每个人只对自己很小圈子里的事才去调查，去认知。一切日常工作之外的知识，却被我们看做是华而不实的玩意儿。
然而，对于我们的无知，我们还是经常地抗拒。我们偶尔振奋一次，进行一下思索推测。我们对一切东西进行思考，甚至着迷——关于人死后的生活，或者关于一些据说亚里士多德也弄不明白的疑惑，例如：“为什么打喷嚏，为什么从子夜到中午则凶，从中午到子夜则好？”人生最大的快乐之一，就是为追求知识而陷入无知。而无知的极大乐趣，归根结底，就是不断提出问题的乐趣。一个人，如果丧失了这个乐趣，或把自己的乐趣隐藏于把它换成教条的东西，那他的头脑就已经开始僵化。
我们羡慕像Jewell这样的人，他勤学好问，到了六十多岁还能坐下来去研究生理学的东西。大多数人，不到他这么大的年龄，对自己的无知感就早已丧失。甚至，我们会对自己有一点浅薄的知识而感到沾沾自喜，甚至觉得，流逝的光阴本身就能传授给我们无所不有的知识。但是我们却忘记了：Socrates之所以以明智名垂千史，并不是因为他无所不知，却是因为他到了七十岁还能意识到，自己仍旧一无所知。