バートランド・ラッセル『ヒューマン・ソサエティ－倫理学から政治学へ』第２部[「情熱の葛藤」- 第２章- Human Society in Ethics and Politics, 1954, Part II, chapter 3
* 原著：Human Society in Ethics and Politics, 1954* 邦訳書：バートランド・ラッセル(著),勝部真長・長谷川鑛平(共訳)『ヒューマン・ソサエティ－倫理学から政治学へ』(玉川大学出版部,1981年７月刊。268+x pp.)
『ヒューマン・ソサエティ』第２部「情熱の葛藤」- 第３章「先見思考と技術」n.12 |
Human Society in Ethics and Politics, 1954, part II: The Conflict of Passions, chapter 3: Forethought and Skill, n.12 |
|
|
The manufacture of weapons, which goes far back into prehistoric times, had originally two purposes of about equal importance: namely, war and hunting. It is not known at what stage our ancestors became meat-eaters, but it is obvious that even the most primitive weapons made it easier to kill animals for meat than it had been. As time went on, the importance of weapons in war came to outweigh their importance in hunting, and, from the time of Archimedes to the present day, improvement in weapons of war has been the main incentive to scientific progress. Progress in technical skill has proceeded at a very uneven rate at different periods of history. After the development of agriculture and the domestication of animals, nothing of equal importance occurred until quite recent times. Peasants in the Nile Valley, five thousand years ago, were not so very different in the matter of skill from their successors of a hundred years ago. But during the past two centuries a complete transformation has taken place, first in a few Western countries and gradually throughout the world. The whole of this transformation is due to now skills. |