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Once we see clearly how after Socrates, the mystagogue of science, one philosophical school succeeds another, wave upon wave;
你一旦看清楚：在科学的神秘论者苏格拉底之后，哲学的派别相继而兴，一浪接一浪，
how the hunger for knowledge reached a never-suspected universality in the widest domain of the educated world, became the real task for every person of higher gifts, and led science onto the high seas from which it has never again been driven altogether;
于是一种料想不到广泛的求知欲普及于全知识界，仿佛求知是一切得天独厚的人们的特殊任务，这就把科学引入汪洋大海之中，从此它一去不返。
how this universality first spread a common net of thought over the whole globe, actually holding out the prospect of the lawfulness of an entire solar system;
由于求知欲的普及，一个共同的思想之网第一次笼罩着整个世界，而且大有穷究整个太阳系的规律之展望；
once we see all this clearly, along with the amazingly high pyramid of knowledge in our own time--we cannot fail to see in Socrates the one turning point and vortex of so-called world history.
如果你看清楚这一切，以及现代科学的高得惊人的金字塔，你就不禁要设想，在苏格拉底身上见到所谓世界历史的转捩点和漩涡。
For if we imagine that the whole incalculable sum of energy used up for this world tendency had been used not in the service of knowledge but for the practical, i.e., egoistic aims of individuals and peoples,
因为，试想那种普遍倾向所使用的无数力量之总和并不是为知识服务，而是为实践的，也就是说，为个人与民族的利己目的服务。
then we realize that in that case universal wars of annihilation and continual migrations of peoples would probably have weakened the instinctive lust for life to such an extent that suicide would have become a general custom and individuals might have experienced the final remnant of a sense of duty when,
大概，在遍地兵燹和不断移民当中，乐生的本能已经大为削弱，以致自杀成风，个人或许还有劫后残存的责任感，
like the inhabitants of the Fiji islands, they had strangled their parents and friends--a practical pessimism that might even have generated a gruesome ethic of genocide [Völkermord.] motivated by pity, and which incidentally is, and was, present in the world wherever art did not appear in some form--especially as religion and science--as a remedy and a preventive for this breath of pestilence.
正象非支（Fiji）群岛的蛮族认为子杀其父，友杀其友是一种责任。于是，一种实践的悲观主义可能产生一种残忍的道德观，认为大屠杀是出于怜悯；——况且，这种情况在世界各处不论从前和今日都有的，凡是在任何形式的艺术，尤其是宗教艺术和科学艺术还未出现，以治疗或预防这种败德窳风的地方，莫不有之。
