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 4
* 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4章「神話と魔力」n.13 |
Human Society in Ethics and Politics, 1954, part II: The Conflict of Passions, chapter 4: Myth and Magic, n.13 | |||
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The world that science, during the last four centuries, has been gradually presenting for our acceptance, is very different and has very different credentials. The man of science asks us to believe it, not because it is what we expect, but because it is what we find; not because poetic vision suggests it, but because the slow accumulation of facts makes it probable. The further physics has penetrated into the secrets of the material world, the more alien that world has been found to be from anything that we can imagine. Although it is only through the senses that we know the physical world, in so far as we do know it, we are nevertheless being driven to the conclusion that the physical world is in all likelihood so different from the world of our sense-perceptions that the most we can know of it is its abstract logical structure. Imagination has not been dethroned, but has become a constitutional monarch. It can no longer invent freely, but only within the limits allowed by scientific method. Within these limits, it is true, it finds new scope. Dante could traverse the universe of his time in twenty-four hours, but the universe of the modern astronomer, even though you travel with the speed of light, takes many millions of years to traverse, and beyond its outermost bounds, countless nebulae, each about as vast as the Milky Way, are perpetually toppling over the edge into eternal invisibility. This new world of astronomy is vast, but cold. Nowhere is there anything in which the longing for human warmth can find comfort, and so the upholders of ancient systems complain of materialism and say that science is forgetting spiritual values. Those who speak in this way are compelled to overlook what myth has done for mankind--the long ages of human sacrifice, of cruel rites, of burnings at the stake, and punishment of those who sought knowledge. They have to forget the cruelty which men have attributed to their gods through making their gods in their own image. They have to forget Hell and the fear of Hell and the morbid anguish with which for many centuries that fear oppressed the human spirit. They have to forget that, in so far as the world of myth has been purged of its cruelty, this has happened in reluctant response to science. Knowledge has been the liberator by destroying the mythical excuses for cruelty. |