Most people would agree that, although our age exceeds all previous ages in knowledge, there has been no corresponding increase in wisdom. But agreement ceases as soon as we attempt to define “wisdom” and consider means of promoting it.
大多数人都会同意，尽管在知识方面我们因年龄增长而增长，但智慧并没有相应的增长。但一旦我们试图定义“智慧”并考虑提升它，协议就停止了。
There are 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 special knowledge required of various kinds of technicians. Suppose, for example, that you are engaged in research in scientific medicine. The work is difficult and is likely to absorb the whole of your mind. You have no 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. This has the entirely unintended result of making the food supply inadequate and lowing the standard of life in the parts of the world that have the greatest populations. To take an even more dramatic example, which is in everybody’s mind at the present time; you study the makeup of the atom from a disinterested desire for knowledge, and by chance place in the hands of a powerful mad man the means of destroying the human race.
有几个因素影响智慧。在这些因素中，应该首先考虑比例：考虑问题中所有重要因素并重视每一个因素的能力。由于各类技术人员所需的专业知识的范围和复杂性，这变得比过去更加困难。例如，假设你正在从事科学医学研究。这项工作很难，很可能会让你全神贯注。你没有时间考虑你的发现或发明在医学领域之外可能产生的影响。比如你成功了，就像现代医学成功了一样，不仅在欧洲和美国，而且在亚洲和非洲，大大降低了婴儿死亡率。这带来了完全出乎意料的结果，使世界上人口最多的地区的粮食供应不足，生活水平下降。举一个更具戏剧性的例子，这是目前每个人心中的想法；你从对知识的无私渴望中研究原子的组成，并偶然将毁灭人类的手段交到一个强大的疯子手中。
Therefore, with every increase of knowledge and skill, wisdom becomes more necessary, for every such increase augments our capacity for realizing our purposes, and therefore augments our capacity for evil, if our purpose are unwise.
因此，随着知识和技能的每一次增长，智慧就变得更加必要，因为每一次这样的增长都会增强我们实现目标的能力，因此，如果我们的目标是不明智的，也会增强我们邪恶的能力。
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