Today marks the 130th anniversary of Mr. Hu Shi's birth.
To some extent, it may be said that Hu Shi may be a Chinese the starting point for modernity. From the existing experience, if you have not read Hu Shi, it is likely that until now, you are still a Chinese without common sense.
The most valuable thing is that throughout his life, Hu Shi always adhered to a gentle attitude, never being provoked by the era of the twentieth century, poisoning together in anger; nor falling into the literary taste of the era aimed at escaping the times. He had every reason to go to one of these poles, but this gentle man had done something that a stubborn character could not do—always criticizing the era with a calm attitude, but not hot, not slippery, not performing, not sophisticated. It is a miracle that such a peaceful attitude can persist in such a filthy world for a lifetime, not a saint, but also a miracle.
Today we share with our readers Zhu Jun mr. Hu Shi's speech at the graduation ceremony of Peking University in 1932 as president of Peking University. Hu Shi told young people that when you are most pessimistic and disappointed, that is when you must summon up strong confidence. Be convinced that there is no wasted effort in the world. Success does not have to be in me, and the skill must not be donated. It is naturally good to have such confidence forever.
There is no wasted effort in the world
Text | Hu shi
Read aloud | Jia Xinquan
01
You are leaving your alma mater now, and I have no gifts for you, so I have to send you a word. The saying goes: "Don't abandon learning." ”
A large part of the previous homework may have been done for this diploma as a last resort. From now on, you can study freely according to your own wishes. Take advantage of the current years of prosperity and strength, and strive to do a kind of special learning. Teenagers are gone forever, and when their energy is exhausted, it is too late to do learning. That is, for the sake of eating, learning will never fail people. Eat without learning, after three years and five years, you will all be eliminated by the backward teenagers. By then, I am afraid it will be too late to do some knowledge to remedy it.
Someone said, "After going out to do things, where is the time to study?" Even if you want to do learning, there is no library and no laboratory, how can you do learning? ”
I say to you: Whoever waits until he has a library to read a book will not read a book if he has a library. Those who have to wait until they have a laboratory to do research will not do research if they have a laboratory.
As for time, it is not a problem. Darwin was ill all his life, unable to work more, and could only work for one o'clock a day. Look at his results! Spend one o'clock a day reading ten pages of useful books, more than 3,600 pages a year, and 110,000 pages in 30 years.
Folks, 110,000 pages can make you a scholar. However, reading three tabloids a day also costs you a little hour; four circles of mahjong also cost you a little and a half hours. Read tabloids, play mahjong, or try to be a scholar? It's up to you to make your own choices! Ibsen said, "Your greatest responsibility is to cast your piece of material into a vessel." "Learning is the tool of casting. To abandon your knowledge is to destroy yourself. Goodbye, your alma mater is watching to see what you will become in ten years' time.
02
The life of students is a life of special preferential treatment, may be childish, may be noisy, society can tolerate them, not strictly hold them responsible for their behavior. Now they have to prop up their shoulders to carry their own burdens. In this difficult and urgent year, their burden is really not light! We wish them success, but we cannot bear not to give them a few farewell words based on our own experience.
After you graduate, there are only a few paths to follow: a very small number of people can continue to do academic research in domestic or foreign research institutes; a small number of people can find considerable careers; in addition, there are three ways to become an official, run a party, and revolution; in addition, they are living in the family or unemployed.
The first way to continue to study, we can not discuss. Those who take the other paths cannot be without the danger of depravity. There are many ways in which the road of life is full of traps and falls, and in summary, there are about two categories:
The first is that it is easy to abandon the desire for knowledge in the student age.
When you go to the actual society, you often use what you have learned, often what you have learned is useless, and you can often not use your knowledge at all, but you can eat and mix with officials. In this environment, even those who have always had the determination to seek knowledge and learning cannot help but be discouraged and lazy, and gradually cool down the desire to seek knowledge. Moreover, learning requires considerable equipment; books, laboratories, teachers and friends, and leisure work are not easy for a person who usually has to support his family. Without an environment of learning, who can blame us for abandoning learning? This paragraph says that society often cannot give us an environment in which we can learn.
The second is the pursuit of the ideal life that is easy to abandon when students are students.
When young people first come into contact with a cold society, they are prone to feel that their ideals and facts are too far apart, and they are prone to pessimism and disappointment. The ideal of life that has been embraced for many years, the enthusiasm for transformation, and the courage to struggle, at this time, it seems that it is not the same thing at all. In that intense social fire, the small individual often melts down without withstanding a long period of roasting, and a little noble ideal is soon disillusioned. Those who come with the dream of transforming society often abandon their armor and drag their soldiers, or become prisoners of the evil forces. In that captive prison, you think back to all the idealism of that youthful and heroic era, as if you have become a self-mistaken dream! From then on, you are willing to give up the pursuit of an ideal life and be willing to be a submissive citizen of ready-made society. This passage says that ideals are easily disillusioned, and people are willing to enslave reality.
03
To defend against the fall of these two aspects, on the one hand, we must maintain our desire for knowledge, and on the other hand, we must maintain our pursuit of an ideal life. What's the best way to do it? From my personal observation and experience, there are three self-defense prescriptions that are worth trying.
The first square has only one sentence: "Always look for one or two problems worth studying!" ”
The problem is the ancestor of knowledge and learning; all knowledge in ancient and modern times has been produced and accumulated because of the need to answer problems--to solve practical or theoretical difficulties. Therefore, Mr. Liang Shuming considers himself to be a "problem person" rather than an "academic person". The so-called "seeking knowledge for the sake of knowledge" is actually just a curiosity to pursue the solution of a certain problem, but because the nature of that problem does not have to be directly applied, people feel that this is a "do nothing" quest for knowledge.
After we left the school, we left the environment of doing learning, and if there were no two difficult questions worth answering in our minds, it would be difficult to continue to maintain the enthusiasm for pursuing knowledge. Unfortunately, the biggest problem for young people at that time was to support their families, and survival was a problem, let alone other problems.
However, if you have a really interesting problem that teases you every day to think of him, lures you to solve him every day, and laughs at you provocatively every day and you have nothing to do with him - at this time, you will go crazy with a woman in love, you can't sit down, you can't sleep restlessly, you have to steal work to accompany her when you don't have time; you have to go on a diet to seduce her when you have no money. Without books, you will become a seller to buy books privately; without instruments, you will take clothes to buy instruments; without teachers and friends, you will travel thousands of miles to find teachers and friends. As long as you can always have difficult problems to force you to use your brain, you will naturally maintain the development of your interest in learning, even in the poorest intellectual environment, you will slowly gather a small library, or set up a small laboratory.
So I said: The first thing to do is to look for problems. The day when there are no problems in your mind is when your intellectual life will come to an end!
04
The second formula also has only one sentence: "There is always a need to develop a little non-professional interest." ”
After leaving school, everyone always had to find a career to eat. But the career you have found may not be what you have learned, or it may not be what you like, or what you have learned is not close to your disposition. In this situation, the work often becomes hard work, and there is no interest.
To do the kind of work that is "not near to sex and can be encouraged" for the sake of subsistence makes it difficult to maintain an interest in knowledge and the ideology of life. The best remedy is to develop more legitimate interests and activities outside of the profession. A man should have his profession, and he should have his non-professional playthings, which can be called amateur activities. Whatever a man does in his spare time is his leisure activity. Often his leisure activities are more important than his profession, because a person's future often depends on how he uses his leisure time. He uses his leisure to play mahjong, and he becomes a gambler; you use your leisure to do social service, you may become a social reformer; or you use your leisure to study history, you may become a historian. Your leisure time is often set for your life.
Two English philosophers of the nineteenth century, Müller served all his life as secretary to the East India Company, but his amateur work gave him a high place in the history of philosophy, economics, and political thought; Spencer was a surveying engineer, but his amateur work made him an important center of world thought in the late pre-century. There was hardly a single person who had asked about gu laicheng university who did not make good use of his leisure time.
Especially in this unorthodox Chinese society, occupation is not easy to suit our temperament, and if we want to live without suffering or degeneration, we can only develop amateur interests in many ways, so that our spirit can be pinned on and our remaining energy can be exerted. With this beloved plaything, you won't get bored by doing six hours of tablewashing, because you know that after wiping the table at six o'clock, you can go home and do your chemistry research, or finish your large landscapes, or write your novels and operas, or continue your historical evidence, or do your social reform work. With this kind of satisfactory activity, life will not be dull, and the spirit will not be bored.
05
The third square also has only one sentence: "You always have to have a little faith." ”
We are born in this unfortunate era, and what we see in our eyes and hear in our ears is nothing more than to make us pessimistic and disappointed. Especially those of you who graduated at this age, seeing that your country and nation have sunk to this step, seeing that the world is only a world of power, looking at the sky seems to be unable to see a glimmer of light,—— in this year, it is already a blessing, how can you still hope to maintain a little inner composure and ideal trust?
I say to you: This is the time for us to cultivate our faith! As long as we have faith, we still have salvation. The ancients said, "Faith can move mountains." He also said, "As long as the work is deep, the pig iron is ground into an embroidery needle." ”
Don't you believe it?
When Napoleon's army conquered Prussia and occupied Berlin, a poor professor named Fichte exhorted his people every day in the lecture hall to have faith, to believe that their people had a special mission of the world and that they were bound to be revived. When Fichte died in 1814, no one could have predicted when the German Unified Empire would be realized. However, within fifty years, the new unified German Empire was realized.
The strength and weakness of a country are not accidental, and neither can escape the iron law of cause and effect. The suffering and shame we suffer today are only the consequences of the evil causes of the past. If we want to reap the good fruits of the future, we must strive to plant new causes for the present. Grain by grain, there will be a full house of harvest, this is the confidence we should have today. One point of hard work, one point of harvest, this is the idea of young people who have just entered the world, but the reality is often that there is no gain, so the ideal is lost, and the soul is numb.
We must be convinced that today's failures are due to past inexperiencies.
We must be convinced that today's efforts will lead to a great harvest in the future.
06
There is a saying in the Buddhist scriptures: "Blessings do not donate." "Tang Donation was lost in vain." We should also say, "Don't donate!" "No effort is lost in vain. When we can't see the unexpected, when we can't see the unthinkable direction, you see! The seeds you have planted have already taken root and blossomed!
Don't you believe it! After France was defeated by Prussia, it cut off two provinces and lost half a million Fro. At this time, there was a hard-working scientist Pasteur who spent his days in his laboratory doing his chemical experiments and microbiological research. He was a most patriotic man, yet he was convinced that only science could save the country. He spent his life demonstrating three scientific problems:
First, each fermentation effect is due to the development of a microbacterium;
Every infectious disease is due to the development of a microbacterium in an organism;
Third, the micro-bacteria of infectious diseases, under special culture, can reduce the virulence and make it change from a germ to a disease-proof seedling.
On the surface, these three problems do not seem to have much to do with the great cause of national salvation. However, as evidenced by the first question, Pasteur instituted a new law for making vinegar wine, which reduced the country's wine and vinegar industry from great losses every year. As evidenced by the second question, Pasteur taught the silk industry throughout the country how to choose seeds to prevent disease, to teach the livestock farmers of the country how to prevent the plague of cattle and sheep, and to teach the medical community around the world how to pay attention to disinfection to reduce the mortality rate of non-surgical procedures. As evidenced by the third question, Pasteur invented the cure for the splenic fever of livestock, which reduced the loss of twenty million Fro every year for the French peasants; and invented the treatment of mad dog bite poison, which saved countless lives.
Therefore, the British scientist Huxley praised Pasteur's merits in the Royal Society: "France has given Germany half a million Flemishes, and Mr. Pasteur's single achievements in science are enough to pay off this reparation." ”
Pasteur had great confidence in science, so he refused to abandon his microscope and laboratory when the country was humiliated. He never wanted to be able to repay the reparations of half a million Fro under his microscope, but when he could not see it, he had already reaped the miracle of scientific salvation.
Friends, when you are most pessimistic and disappointed, that is when you must muster up strong faith. Be convinced that there is no wasted effort in the world. Success does not have to be in me, and the skill must not be donated. It is naturally good to have such confidence forever.