I shall assume that I am writing for readers who are full, or have in the past been full, of a proper spirit of ambition. A man's first duty, a young man's at any rate, is to be ambitious. Ambition is a noble passion which may legitimately take many forms; there was something noble in the ambitions of Attila or Napoleon; but the noblest ambition is that of leaving behind something of permanent value----
Here, on the level sand,
Between the sea and land,
What shall I build or write
Against the fall of night?
Tell me of runes to grave
That hold the bursting wave,
Or bastions to design,
For longer date than mine.
Ambition has been the driving force behind nearly all the best work of the world. In particular, practically all substantial contributions to human happiness have been made by amb... (查看原文)
Physiology provides particularly good examples, just because it is so obviously a 'beneficial' study. We must guard against a fallacy common among aplogist of science, the fallacy of supposing that the men whose work most benefits humanity are thinking much of that while they do it, that physiologists, for example, have particularly noble souls. A physiologist may indeed be glad to remember that his work will benefit mankind, but the motives which provide the force and the inspiration for it are indistinguishable form those of a classical scholar or mathematician. (查看原文)
C.P. Snow
Nevertheless, he had to live with an over-delicate nature. He seems to have been born with three skins too few. Unlike Einstein, who had to subjugate his powerful ego in the study of the external world before he could attain his moral stature, Hardy had to strengthen an ego which wasn't much protected. This at times in later life made him self-assertive (as Einstein never was) when he had to take a moral stand. On the other hand, it gave him his introspective insight and beautiful candour, so that he could speak of himself with absolute simplicity (as Einstein never could).
His behaviour was often different, bizarrely so, from ours: but it came to seem a kind of superstructure set upon a nature which wasn't all that different from our own, except that it was more delicate,... (查看原文)
