My view of history is itself a tiny piece of history; and this mainly other people’s history and not my own; for a scholar’s life-work is to add his bucketful of water to the great and growing river of knowledge fed by countless bucketfuls of the kind. If my individual view of history is to be made at all illuminating, or indeed intelligible, it must be presented in its origin, growth, and social and personal setting.
(1)In the current Japan, human characters, such as "whether or not a person is reliable” or "whether or not a person gives importance to his or her word" have become obsolete as the standards for judgment of people. In the first place, even the phrase "an eye for people" became a dead language. (2)"An eye for people" indicates the ability to evaluate a person in front as a net human being without being confused by his or her profile information, however now nobody requests such an ability any more.(3)The ideology is prevailing in the current Japan that human beings should be estimated on the basis of "evidence" of profiles, such as annual income, status, and social power, irrespective of his or her true personality.
Contemporary learning has rapidly been changing. (A)We can obtain knowledge immediately on the Internet without learning from other people or reading books. Therefore, students need not go to universities for the purpose of learning knowledge. If so, what do they learn at universities? To tell the truth, they go to universities in order to know not what has currently been known, but what is unknown now, and to face their possibilities through meeting with other people who have different personalities from theirs. On the Internet, we can obtain already-knowns, but we can’t know any unknowns. A lot of things remain unknown in this world. But, we can’t see such unknowns without asking a proper question about them.
University teachers are those who have had the experience of asking such proper questions through their own researches. Answers for these questions lie not on the Internet, but in the researches of respective researcher. Students learn these researches, ask their own questions, and find their own answers, which constitutes their own identities and lead them to their own possibilities. (B)Learning at universities is not an operation to find yourself between prepared questions and answers, but one to discover unknown yourself in the unknown world. The environment as a university, teachers and officials, and your schoolfellows will support your discovering operation.
Thus, university teachers must have their own answers and questions in their specialized fields, as well as those which have been asked so far. University teachers do not have a teaching license. They only have self-pride and actual achievements as a researcher. (C)This is because they do not teach existing knowledge like elementary, junior high and high school education, but they are requested to teach students how to make their way to unknown answers, and to send the students to the path through which they can meet with unknown themselves. For this purpose, university teachers always have to keep a thorough knowledge of the extent and depth of their specialized fields, also they themselves have to continue to make a challenge to unknowns. From now, the students who learned at universities have not only to adapt themselves to the society, but also to build up a new society or a new world. Universities are just the place where students can expand their possibilities.
Common features behind the differences in our appearances will be surfaced not by asking “why we can’t understand each other,” but by asking “why we can understand each other.”
If you notice these common features, you must have a mental allowance to admit such differences. We should have a belief that “we can potentially understand each other,” paying attention to the fact that we all are brothers and sisters who used to share the same long history, not focusing on only “how people in the world are different each other.”
We are usually living, while making full use of the five senses, such as the senses of taste, sight, touch, hearing, and smell. These five senses, at a glance, seem to be individual, subjective, and physical actions, however actually, they are also cultural and historical actions. How and what do you feel about something, such as softness or hardness you feel when you touch something, sounds you hear in a city, or tastes of food, differs depending on the society, culture, or time in which you have been born and grown up.
Why did I come to learn history? There were various reasons for it, but I was probably sure that I had a vague interest in how our world we are living now has been made up, or why it has formed as a present shape. Further, when digging a bit deeper into this matter, I also felt such that when thinking of the course through which Japan had achieved the modernization while being affected by European countries, I had to know more about such European countries. I had been longing for America when I was a high school student. I was attracted by folk songs that became popular those days, and was also crazy about western movies and the fashions of prestigious universities in the eastern North America. However, once I entered a university, my interest shifted from America to European countries; first to Germany, before long to England, the reason for which I can’t explain clearly even by myself.
If you do something considering the balance of profits and losses, the fruit must be unsatisfactory. Even though you provide someone with every convenience expecting something in return, it is often the case that such a person forgets your convenience completely. On the other hand, a person, whom you helped with good intentions, has been appreciating your help ever since, and sometimes repays you for your kindness when you are really in difficulties. There is a proverb saying that “kindness does not go unrewarded.” It is just a word that aptly expresses a truth in the world of human beings.
Man, though his body is insignificant and powerless in comparison with the great bodies of the astronomer’s world, is yet able to mirror that world, is able to travel in imagination and scientific knowledge through enormous abysses of space and time. What he knows already of the world in which he lives would be unbelievable to his ancestors of a thousand years ago; and in view of the speed with which he is acquiring knowledge there is every reason to think that, if he continues on his present course, what he will know a thousand years from now will be equally beyond what we can imagine. But it is not only, or even principally, in knowledge that man at his best deserves admiration. Men have created beauty; they have had strange visions that seemed like the first glimpse of a land of wonder; they have been capable of love, of sympathy for the whole human race, of vast hopes for mankind as a whole.
I wonder how anyone can have the face to condemn others when he reflects upon his thoughts. A great part of our lives is occupied in reverie, and the more imaginative we are, the more varied and vivid this will be. How many of us could face having our reveries automatically registered and set before us? We should be overcome with shame. We should cry that we could not really be as mean, as wicked, as petty, as selfish, as obscene, as snobbish, as vain, as sentimental, as that. Yet surely our reveries are as much part of us as our actions, and if there were a being to whom our inmost thoughts were known we might just as well be held responsible for them as for our deeds. Men forget the horrible thoughts that wander through their own minds, and are indignant when they discover them in others.
There are many kinds of loneliness. Hilary was too young to experience that loneliness which is at once a criticism of life and our relation to it: the feeling that we can never share with any one our deepest feelings; that all that is most personal to ourselves must remain locked forever in our hearts; that from birth to death we are strangers to our fellow-humans; that life is a series of superficial contacts, brief or long, sad or happy; that as no one in the last analysis means to us, so can we matter only to those to whom we are of material assistance, and to those only in the measure that our assistance is great or little; that feelings he was too young to know. The loneliness of a new boy’s first days at school is the loneliness of one who, returning at the day’s close to dismal and solitary lodgings, gazes wistfully across at a London square’s lighted windows; they represent everything in the world he longs for and has not got. Happiness exists. But he is apart form it
