* 航空写真(左右):ケンブリッジ大学トリニティ・コレッジ(円内は Great Court,その西側にあるのが Neville's Court, Neville's Court の南にあるのが New Court) * 右下イラスト出典:B. Russell's The Good Citizen's Alphabet, 1953.
私がケンブリッジで身につけた真に価値ある一つの思考習慣は,'知的誠実'ということであった。この美徳は,単に友人たちの間ばかりでなく,教師たちの間にも,確かに存在していた。私は,学生の誰かが先生の誤りを指摘した時,指摘されたことに憤慨した教師の実例を一つも思い出せないが,学生がこのような手柄をなしとげることに成功した機会は,かなりの数,思い出すことができる。ある時,流体静力学の講義中に,若い学生の一人が講義をさえぎってこう言った。「先生はフタにかかる遠心力を忘れてはいませんか?」と。その講師は驚いて息を止め,そうしてこう言った「・・・私は20年間この例をそういう風に扱ってきた。しかし君の方が正しい」と。 第一次世界大戦中,ケンブリッジ大学においてさえ,'知的誠実さ'に限界があることを発見したのは,私にとって打撃であった。それまでは,私は,どこに住んでいようと,ケンブリッジ大学だけがこの地上において安息所(我が家)とみなせる唯一の場所であると感じていた。
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Cambridge was important in my life through the fact that it gave me friends, and experience of intellectual discussion, but it was not important through the actual academic instruction. Of the mathematical teaching I have already spoken. Most of what I learned in philosophy has come to seem to me erroneous, and I spent many subsequent years in gradually unlearning the habits of thought which I had there acquired. The one habit of thought of real value that I acquired there was intellectual honesty. This virtue certainly existed not only among my friends, but among my teachers. I cannot remember any instance of a teacher resenting it when one of his pupils showed him to be in error, though I can remember quite a number of occasions on which pupils succeeded in performing this feat. Once during a lecture on hydrostatics, one of the young men interrupted to say: 'Have you not forgotten the centrifugal forces on the lid? The lecturer gasped, and then said : 'I have been doing this example that way for twenty years, but you are right.' It was a blow to me during the War to find that, even at Cambridge, intellectual honesty had its limitations. Until then, wherever I lived, I felt that Cambridge was the only place on earth that I could regard as home. |
(掲載日:2005.06.18/更新日:2011.1.30)