解放军文职招聘考试Knowledge and Progress

 Knowledge and Progress

Why does the idea of progress loom so large in the modern world?

Surely because progress of a particular kind is actually taking place around us

and is becoming more and more manifest.

Although mankind has undergone no general improvement in intelligence or morality,

it has made extraordinary progress in the accumulation of knowledge.

Knowledge began to increase as soon as the thoughts of one individual

could be communicated to another by means of speech.

With the invention of writing， a great advance was made,

for knowledge could then be not only communicated but also stored.

Libraries made education possible, and education in its turn added to libraries:

the growth of knowledge followed a kind of compound interest law,

which was greatly enhanced by the invention of printing.

All this was comparatively slow until, with the coming of science,

the tempo was suddenly raised.

Then knowledge began to be accumulated according to a systematic plan.

The trickle became a stream;

the stream has now become a torrent.

Moreover, as soon as new knowledge is acquired, it is now turned to practical account.

What is called “modern civilization” is not the result of a balanced development of all man's nature,

but of accumulated knowledge applied to practical life.

The problem now facing humanity is:

What is going to be done with all this knowledge?

As is so often pointed out, knowledge is a two-edged weapon

which can be used equally for good or evil.

It is now being used indifferently for both.

Could any spectacle, for instance, be more grimly weird

than that of gunners using science to shatter men's bodies while, close at hand,

surgeons use it to restore them?

We have to ask ourselves very seriously what will happen if this twofold use of knowledge,

with its ever-increasing power, continues.

Passage 8. Address by Engels

On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon,

the greatest living thinker ceased to think.

He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes,

and when we came back we found him in his armchair,

peacefully gone to sleep—but forever.

An immeasurable loss has been sustained both by the militant proletariat of Europe and America,

and by historical science, in the death of this man.

The gap that has been left by the departure of this mighty spirit

will soon enough make itself felt.

Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature,

so Marx discovered the law of development of human history:

the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology,

that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing,

before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.;

that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence

and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people

or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions,

the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion,

of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore,

be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.

But that is not all.

Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created.

The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem, in trying to solve which all previous investigations, of both bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had been groping in the dark.

Two such discoveries would be enough for one lifetime.

Happy the man to whom it is granted to make even one such discovery.

But in every single field which Marx investigated—and he investigated very many fields, none of them superficially—in every field, even in that of mathematics, he made independent discoveries.