I wonder now if I can put before you very briefly10 the main generalizations11 that were growing up in my mind during my exile, the simplified picture into which I translated the billions of sights and sounds and—smells, for every part of the world has its distinctive13 olfactory14 palette as much as its palette of colors—that rained daily and nightly upon my mind.
Before, my eyes again as I sit here in this quiet walled French garden, the great space before the Jumna Musjid at Delhi reappears, as I saw it in the evening stillness against a glowing sky of gold, and the memory of countless15 worshippers within, praying with a devotion no European displays. And then comes a memory of that long reef of staircases and temples and buildings, the ghats of Benares, in the blazing morning sun, swarming16 with a vast multitude of multicolored people and the water also swarming with brown bodies. It has the colors of a bed of extravagantly17 splendid flowers and the light that is Indian alone. Even as I sit here these places are alive with happening. It is just past midday here; at this moment the sun sinks in the skies of India, the Jumna Musjid flushes again with the glow of sunset, the smoke of evening fires streams heavenward against its subtle lines, and upon those steps at Benares that come down the hillside between the conquering mosque18 of Aurangzeb and the shining mirror of the Ganges a thousand silent seated figures fall into meditation19. And other memories recur20 and struggle with one another; the crowded river-streets of Canton, the rafts and houseboats and junks innumerable, riding over inky water, begin now to twinkle with a thousand lights. They are ablaze21 in Osaka and Yokohama and Tokio, and the swarming staircase streets of Hong Kong glitter with a wicked activity now that night has come. I flash a glimpse of Burmese temples, of villages in Java, of the sombre purple masses of the walls of the Tartar city at Pekin with squat22 pagoda-guarded gates. How those great outlines lowered at me in the twilight23, full of fresh memories and grim anticipations24 of baseness and violence and bloodshed! I sit here recalling it—feeling it all out beyond the trellised vine-clad wall that bounds my physical vision.... Vast crowded world that I have seen! going from point to point seeking for clues, for generalities, until at last it seems to me that there emerges—something understandable.
I think I have got something understandable out of it all.
What a fantastically courageous25 thing is this mind of ours! My thoughts seem to me at once presumptuous26 and inevitable27. I do not know why it is that I should dare, that any of us should dream of this attempt to comprehend. But we who think are everyone impelled28 to this amazing effort to get it all together into some simple generality. It is not reason but a deep-seated instinct that draws our intelligence towards explanations, that sets us perpetually seeking laws, seeking statements that will fit into infinite, incessantly29 interweaving complexities30, and be true of them all! There is I perceive a valiant31 and magnificent stupidity about the human mind, a disregard of disproportion and insufficiency—like the ferret which will turn from the leveret it has seized to attack even man if he should interfere32. By these desperate feats33 of thinking it is that our species has achieved its victories. By them it survives. By them it must stand the test of ultimate survival. Some forgotten man in our ancestry35—for every begetting36 man alive was in my individual ancestry and yours three thousand years ago—first dared to think of the world as round,—an astounding37 temerity38. He rolled up the rivers and mountains, the forests and plains and broad horizons that stretched beyond his ken39, that seemed to commonsense40 to go on certainly for ever, into a ball, into a little ball "like an orange." Magnificent feat34 of the imagination, outdoing Thor's deep draught41 of the sea! And once he had done it, all do it and no one falters42 at the deed. You are not yet seven as I write and already you are serenely43 aware that you live upon a sphere. And in much the same manner it is that we, who are sociologists and economists44, publicists and philosophers and what not, are attempting now to roll up the vast world of facts which concern human intercourse45, the whole indeed of history and archæology, into some similar imaginable and manageable shape, that presently everyone will be able to grasp.
I suppose there was a time when nobody bothered at all about the shape of the earth, when nobody had even had the idea that the earth could be conceived as having a shape, and similarly it is true that it is only in recent centuries that people have been able to suppose that there was a shape to human history. It is indeed not much more than a century since there was any real emergence46 from theological assumptions and pure romanticism and accidentalism in these matters. Old Adam Smith it was, probing away at the roots of economics, who set going the construction of ampler propositions. From him spring all those new interpretations47 which have changed the writing of history from a record of dramatic reigns49 and wars and crises to an analysis of economic forces. How impossible it would be for anyone now to write that great chapter of Gibbon's in which he sweeps together into one contempt the history of sixty Emperors and six hundred years of time. His note of weariness and futility50 vanishes directly one's vision penetrates51 the immediate52 surface. Those Heraclians and Isaurians and Comneni were not history, a schoolboy nowadays knows that their record is not history, knows them for the mere53 scum upon the stream.
And still to-day we have our great interpretations to make. Ours is a time of guesses, theories and provisional generalizations. Our phase corresponds to the cosmography that was still a little divided between discs and domes54 and spheres and cosmic eggs; that was still a thousand years from measuring and weighing a planet. For a long time my mind hovered55 about the stimulating56 theories of Socialism and particularly about those more systematic forms of Socialist57 teaching that centre about Karl Marx. He rose quite naturally out of those early economists who saw all the world in terms of production and saving. He was a necessary step for me at least, on the way to understanding. For a time I did so shape the world in my mind that it seemed to me no more than a vast enterprise for the organization and exploitation of labor58. For a time I thought human life was essentially59 a labor problem, that working and controlling work and lending and selling and "speculating" made the essential substance of human life, over which the forms of politics ran as the stripes of a tiger's skin run and bend over its living muscles. I followed my period in thinking that. You will find in Ferrero's "Roman Decline," which was published early in this century, and which waits for you in the library, almost exactly the method of interpretation48 that was recommending itself to me in 1904 and 1905.
Well, the labor problem concerns a great—substantial, shall I say?—in human society. It is only I think the basis and matter of society, not its shape and life and reality, but it had to be apprehended60 before I could get on to more actual things. Insensibly the idea that contemporary political forms mattered very fundamentally to men, was fading out of my mind. The British Empire and the German Empire, the Unity61 of Italy, and Anglo-Saxon ascendency, the Yellow Peril62 and all the other vast phantoms63 of the World-politician's mythology64 were fading out of my mind in those years, as the Olympic cosmogony must have faded from the mind of some inquiring Greek philosopher in the days of Heraclitus. And I revised my history altogether in the new light. The world had ceased to be chaotic in my mind; it had become a vast if as yet a quite inconclusive drama between employer and employed.
It makes a wonderful history, this history of mankind as a history of Labor, as a history of the perpetual attempts of an intelligent minority to get things done by other people. It does not explain how that aggression65 of the minority arose nor does it give any conception of a primordial66 society which corresponds with our knowledge of the realities of primitive67 communities. One begins rather in the air with a human society that sells and barters68 and sustains contracts and permits land to be privately69 owned, and having as hastily as possible got away from that difficulty of beginnings, having ignored the large areas of the world which remain under a pacific and unprogressive agriculture to this day, the rest of the story becomes extremely convincing and illuminating70. It does indeed give a sustaining explanation to a large part of recorded history, this generalization12 about the proclivity71 of able and energetic people to make other people do things. One ignores what is being done as if that mattered nothing, and concentrates upon the use and enslavement of men.
One sees that enslavement to labor progressing from crude directness to the most subtly indirect methods. The first expedient72 of enterprise was the sword and then the whip, and still there are remote and ugly corners of the world, in the Mexican Valle Nazionale or in Portuguese73 South Africa, where the whip whistles still and the threat of great suffering and death follows hard upon the reluctant toiler75. But the larger part of our modern slavery is past the stage of brand and whip. We have fallen into methods at once more subtle and more effective. We stand benevolently76 in front of our fellow man, offering, almost as if it were food and drink and shelter and love, the work we want him to do; and behind him, we are acutely aware, is necessity, sometimes quite of our making, as when we drive him to work by a hut-tax or a poll tax or a rent, that obliges him to earn money, and sometimes not so obviously of our making, sometimes so little of our making that it is easy to believe we have no power to remove it. Instead of flicking77 the whip, we groan78 at last with Harriet Martineau at the inexorable laws of political economy that condemn79 us to comfort and direction, and those others to toil74 and hardship and indignity80....
And through the consideration of these latter later aspects it was that I came at last to those subtler problems of tacit self-deception, of imperfect and unwilling81 apprehension82, of innocently assumed advantages, of wilfully83 disregarded unfairness; and also to all those other problems of motive84, those forgotten questions of why we make others work for us long after our personal needs are satisfied, why men aggrandize85 and undertake, which gradually have become in my mind the essential problems of human relationship, replacing the crude problems of labor altogether in that position, making them at last only questions of contrivance and management on the way to greater ends.
I have come to believe now that labor problems are problems merely by the way. They have played their part in a greater scheme. This phase of expropriation and enslavement, this half designed and half unconscious driving of the duller by the clever, of the pacific by the bolder, of those with weak appetites and imaginations by those with stronger appetites and imaginations, has been a necessary phase in human development. With my innate86 passionate87 desire to find the whole world purposeful, I cannot but believe that. But however necessary it has been, it is necessary no longer. Strangest of saviors, there rises over the conflicts of mankind the glittering angular promise of the machine. There is no longer any need for slavery, open or disguised. We do not need slaves nor toilers nor mere laborers88 any more; they are no longer essential to a civilization. Man has ridden on his brother man out of the need of servitude. He struggles through to a new phase, a phase of release, a phase when leisure and an unexampled freedom is possible to every human being. Is possible. And it is there one halts seeing that splendid possibility of aspiration89 and creation before mankind—and seeing mankind for the most part still downcast, quite unaware90 or incredulous, following the old rounds, the grooves91 of ancient and superseded92 assumptions and subjections....
But here I will not trace in any detail the growth of my conviction that the ancient and heavy obligation to work hard and continually throughout life has already slipped from man's shoulders. Suffice it that now I conceive of the task before mankind as a task essentially of rearrangement, as a problem in relationships, extremely complex and difficult indeed, but credibly93 solvable. During my Indian and Chinese journey I was still at the Marxist stage. I went about the east looking at labor, watching its organization and direction, seeing great interests and enterprises replace the diffused94 life of an earlier phase; the disputes and discussions in the Transvaal which had first opened my mind to these questions came back to me, and steadily I lost my interest in those mere political and national issues with their paraphernalia95 of kings and flags and governments and parties that had hitherto blinded me to these more fundamental interactions.
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1
consecutive
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| adj.连续的，联贯的，始终一贯的 | |
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inert
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| adj.无活动能力的，惰性的；迟钝的 | |
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steadily
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| adv.稳定地；不变地；持续地 | |
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chaotic
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| adj.混沌的，一片混乱的，一团糟的 | |
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tangle
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| n.纠缠；缠结；混乱；v.(使)缠绕；变乱 | |
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hostilities
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| n.战争；敌意(hostility的复数)；敌对状态；战事 | |
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tolerances
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| n.宽容( tolerance的名词复数 )；容忍；忍耐力；偏差 | |
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systematic
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| adj.有系统的，有计划的，有方法的 | |
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persistent
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| adj.坚持不懈的，执意的；持续的 | |
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briefly
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| adv.简单地，简短地 | |
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generalizations
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| 一般化( generalization的名词复数 )； 普通化； 归纳； 概论 | |
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generalization
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| n.普遍性，一般性，概括 | |
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distinctive
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| adj.特别的，有特色的，与众不同的 | |
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olfactory
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| adj.嗅觉的 | |
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countless
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| adj.无数的，多得不计其数的 | |
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swarming
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| 密集( swarm的现在分词 )； 云集； 成群地移动； 蜜蜂或其他飞行昆虫成群地飞来飞去 | |
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extravagantly
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| adv.挥霍无度地 | |
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mosque
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| n.清真寺 | |
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meditation
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| n.熟虑，（尤指宗教的）默想，沉思，（pl.）冥想录 | |
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recur
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| vi.复发，重现，再发生 | |
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ablaze
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| adj.着火的，燃烧的；闪耀的，灯火辉煌的 | |
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squat
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| v.蹲坐，蹲下；n.蹲下；adj.矮胖的，粗矮的 | |
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twilight
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| n.暮光，黄昏；暮年，晚期，衰落时期 | |
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anticipations
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| 预期( anticipation的名词复数 )； 预测； （信托财产收益的）预支； 预期的事物 | |
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courageous
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| adj.勇敢的，有胆量的 | |
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presumptuous
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| adj.胆大妄为的，放肆的，冒昧的，冒失的 | |
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inevitable
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| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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impelled
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| v.推动、推进或敦促某人做某事( impel的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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incessantly
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| ad.不停地 | |
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complexities
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| 复杂性(complexity的名词复数)； 复杂的事物 | |
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valiant
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| adj.勇敢的，英勇的；n.勇士，勇敢的人 | |
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interfere
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| v.(in)干涉，干预；(with)妨碍，打扰 | |
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feats
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| 功绩，伟业，技艺( feat的名词复数 ) | |
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feat
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| n.功绩；武艺，技艺；adj.灵巧的，漂亮的，合适的 | |
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ancestry
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| n.祖先，家世 | |
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begetting
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| v.为…之生父( beget的现在分词 )；产生，引起 | |
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astounding
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| adj.使人震惊的vt.使震惊，使大吃一惊astound的现在分词) | |
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temerity
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| n.鲁莽，冒失 | |
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ken
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| n.视野，知识领域 | |
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commonsense
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| adj.有常识的；明白事理的；注重实际的 | |
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draught
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| n.拉，牵引，拖；一网（饮，吸，阵)；顿服药量，通风；v.起草，设计 | |
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falters
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| （嗓音）颤抖( falter的第三人称单数 )； 支吾其词； 蹒跚； 摇晃 | |
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serenely
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| adv.安详地，宁静地，平静地 | |
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economists
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| n.经济学家，经济专家( economist的名词复数 ) | |
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intercourse
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| n.性交；交流，交往，交际 | |
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emergence
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| n.浮现，显现，出现，（植物）突出体 | |
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interpretations
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| n.解释( interpretation的名词复数 )；表演；演绎；理解 | |
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interpretation
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| n.解释，说明，描述；艺术处理 | |
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reigns
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| n.君主的统治( reign的名词复数 )；君主统治时期；任期；当政期 | |
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futility
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| n.无用 | |
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51
penetrates
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| v.穿过( penetrate的第三人称单数 )；刺入；了解；渗透 | |
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immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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domes
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| n.圆屋顶( dome的名词复数 )；像圆屋顶一样的东西；圆顶体育场 | |
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hovered
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| 鸟( hover的过去式和过去分词 )； 靠近（某事物）； （人）徘徊； 犹豫 | |
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stimulating
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| adj.有启发性的，能激发人思考的 | |
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socialist
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| n.社会主义者；adj.社会主义的 | |
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labor
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| n.劳动，努力，工作，劳工；分娩；vi.劳动，努力，苦干；vt.详细分析；麻烦 | |
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essentially
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| adv.本质上，实质上，基本上 | |
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apprehended
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| 逮捕，拘押( apprehend的过去式和过去分词 )； 理解 | |
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unity
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| n.团结，联合，统一；和睦，协调 | |
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peril
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| n.(严重的)危险；危险的事物 | |
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phantoms
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| n.鬼怪，幽灵( phantom的名词复数 ) | |
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mythology
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| n.神话，神话学，神话集 | |
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aggression
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| n.进攻，侵略，侵犯，侵害 | |
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primordial
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| adj.原始的；最初的 | |
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primitive
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| adj.原始的；简单的；n.原(始)人，原始事物 | |
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barters
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| n.物物交换，易货( barter的名词复数 )v.作物物交换，以货换货( barter的第三人称单数 ) | |
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privately
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| adv.以私人的身份，悄悄地，私下地 | |
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illuminating
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| a.富于启发性的，有助阐明的 | |
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proclivity
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| n.倾向，癖性 | |
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expedient
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| adj.有用的，有利的；n.紧急的办法，权宜之计 | |
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Portuguese
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| n.葡萄牙人；葡萄牙语 | |
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toil
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| vi.辛劳工作，艰难地行动；n.苦工，难事 | |
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toiler
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| 辛劳者，勤劳者 | |
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benevolently
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| adv.仁慈地，行善地 | |
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flicking
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| （尤指用手指或手快速地）轻击( flick的现在分词 )； （用…）轻挥； （快速地）按开关； 向…笑了一下（或瞥了一眼等） | |
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groan
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| vi./n.呻吟，抱怨；(发出)呻吟般的声音 | |
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condemn
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| vt.谴责，指责；宣判(罪犯)，判刑 | |
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indignity
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| n.侮辱，伤害尊严，轻蔑 | |
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81
unwilling
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| adj.不情愿的 | |
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apprehension
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| n.理解，领悟；逮捕，拘捕；忧虑 | |
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wilfully
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| adv.任性固执地；蓄意地 | |
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84
motive
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| n.动机，目的；adv.发动的，运动的 | |
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85
aggrandize
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| v.增大，扩张，吹捧 | |
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86
innate
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| adj.天生的，固有的，天赋的 | |
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87
passionate
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，激昂的，易动情的，易怒的，性情暴躁的 | |
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88
laborers
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| n.体力劳动者，工人( laborer的名词复数 )；（熟练工人的）辅助工 | |
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89
aspiration
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| n.志向，志趣抱负；渴望；(语)送气音；吸出 | |
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90
unaware
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| a.不知道的，未意识到的 | |
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91
grooves
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| n.沟( groove的名词复数 )；槽；老一套；（某种）音乐节奏v.沟( groove的第三人称单数 )；槽；老一套；（某种）音乐节奏 | |
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92
superseded
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| [医]被代替的，废弃的 | |
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93
credibly
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| ad.可信地；可靠地 | |
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94
diffused
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| 散布的，普及的，扩散的 | |
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95
paraphernalia
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| n.装备；随身用品 | |
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