激情晨读英语美文 第五章 青春永恒:大学及其功用

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Universities and Their Function
By Alfred North Whitehead
The justification for a university is that
it preserves the connection between knowledge
and the zest of life,
by uniting the young
and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning.
The university imparts information,
but it imparts it imaginatively.
At least, this is the function
which it should perform for society.
A university which fails in this respect
has no reason for existence.
This atmosphere of excitement,
arising from imaginative consideration, transforms knowledge.
A fact is no longer a bare fact:
it is invested with all its possibilities.
It is no longer a burden on the memory:
it is energising as the poet of our dreams,
and as the architect of our purposes.
Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts:
it is a way of illuminating the facts.
It works by drawing the general principles
which apply to the facts, as they exist,
and then by an intellectual survey of
alternative possibilities
which are consistent with those principles.
It enables men to construct
an intellectual vision of a new world,
and it preserves the zest of life
by the suggestion of satisfying purposes.
Youth is imaginative,
and if the imagination be strengthened
by discipline this energy of imagination
can in great measure be preserved through life.
The tragedy of the world is that those
who are imaginative have but slight experience,
and those who are experienced have feeble imaginations.
Fools act on imagination without knowledge;
pedants act on knowledge without imagination.
The task of a university is to
weld together imagination and experience.