The average man who uses a telephone could not explain how a telephone works. He takes for granted the telephone, the railway train, the linotype, the airplane, as our grandfathers took for granted the miracles of the gospels. He neither question nor understand them. It is as though each of us investigated and made his own a tiny circle of facts. Knowledge outside the day’s work is regarded by most men as a gewgaw. Still we are constantly in reaction against our ignorance. We rouse ourselves at intervals and speculate. We revel in speculations about anything at all --- about life after death or about such questions as that which is said to have puzzled Aristotle, “Why sneezing from noon to midnight was good, but from night to noon unlucky?” One of the greatest joys known to man is to take such a flight into ignorance in search of the knowledge. The great pleasure of ignorance is, after all, the pleasure of asking questions. The man who has lost this pleasure or exchanged it for the pleasure of dogma, which is the pleasure of answering, is already beginning to stiffen. One envies so inquisitive a man as Jewell, who sat down to the study of physiology in his sixties. Most of us have lost the sense of our ignorance long before that age. We even become vain of our squirrel’s hoard of knowledge and regard increasing age itself as a school of omniscience. We forget that Socrates was famed for wisdom not because he was omniscient but because he realized at the age of seventy that he still knew nothing.

    一般用電話的人都不懂電話是怎樣工作的，他們總是把電話、鐵路、排字機(jī)、飛機(jī)等看成是自然而然的東西，就像我們的祖先覺(jué)得福音書(shū)里的奇事都是很自然的一樣。他們不懂，也不問(wèn)。似乎我們每個(gè)人都只鉆研、弄懂很小范圍內(nèi)的一些事情。大多數(shù)人都認(rèn)為日常生活之外的知識(shí)是花里胡哨的東西。然而，我們也在不停地抗拒著我們的無(wú)知。有時(shí)，我們會(huì)振奮起來(lái)，進(jìn)行思考。我們會(huì)信手拈來(lái)一個(gè)問(wèn)題，然后沉浸在思考中――如死后的生活，或者其它問(wèn)題，比如一個(gè)據(jù)說(shuō)曾經(jīng)困擾亞里士多德的問(wèn)題：“為什么從中午到午夜打噴嚏是好運(yùn)氣，而從午夜到中午打噴嚏代表壞運(yùn)氣？”在尋找知識(shí)的過(guò)程中陷入無(wú)知，是人類的一大樂(lè)事。無(wú)知的快樂(lè)，說(shuō)到底，是提問(wèn)題的快樂(lè)。一個(gè)已經(jīng)不會(huì)提問(wèn)的人，一個(gè)用教條的答案回答問(wèn)題并以此為樂(lè)的人，他的頭腦已經(jīng)開(kāi)始僵化了。我們很羨慕裘伊，他在六十多歲的時(shí)候居然開(kāi)始做下來(lái)學(xué)習(xí)生理學(xué)，而大多數(shù)人在遠(yuǎn)未達(dá)到這個(gè)年齡就已經(jīng)不知道什么是無(wú)知了。我們甚至?xí)�為我們的一點(diǎn)淺薄的知識(shí)而沾沾自喜，甚至覺(jué)得，流逝的時(shí)光本身就會(huì)自然地給我們所有的知識(shí)。我們忘了，蘇格拉底之所以流芳百世，不是因?yàn)樗�什么都懂，而是他發(fā)現(xiàn)在他七十歲的時(shí)候，仍然什么都不懂。