Most people would agree that, although our age exceeds all previous ages in knowledge, there has been no corresponding increase in wisdom. But agreement ceases as soon as we attempt to define “wisdom” and consider means of promoting it.
There are several factors that contribute to wisdom. Of them I should put first a sense of proportion: the capacity to take account of all the important factors in a problem and to attach each its due weigh. This has become more difficult than it used to be owing to the extent and complexity of the special knowledge required of various kinds of techniques. Suppose, for example, that you are engaged in research in scientific medicine. The work is likely to absorb the whole of your mind. You have no time to consider the effect which your discoveries or inventions may have outside the field of medicine. You succeed in enormously lowering the infant death-rate in the world. This has the entirely unintended result of making the food supply inadequate and lowering the standard of life in the parts of the world that have the greatest populations. To take an even more dramatic example, you study the makeup of the atom from a disinterested (无利害关系的) desire for knowledge, and by chance place in the hands of a powerful mad man the means of destroying the human race.
Therefore, with every increase of knowledge and skill, wisdom becomes more necessary, for every such increase augments our capacity for realizing our purposes, and therefore augments our capacity for evil, if our purposes are unwise.
