原强

简介

“On Strength” is one of four essays that Yan Fu published in the Tianjin newspaper Zhibao in 1895, in the months after China’s defeat by Japan. It opens with Darwin and with Spencer’s science of society and asks why Western nations had become so powerful. Yan Fu’s answer is that power rests on three qualities of a people – physical strength, knowledge and moral virtue – and that Western institutions, including liberty, serve to develop them. China’s weakness, he argued, lay not in a lack of weapons but in a political and educational order that kept these qualities undeveloped. The essay, revised in later years, set out the programme that guided his translations.

联系

承接了

• 物种起源1859 · 查尔斯·达尔文
• 社会学原理1876 · 赫伯特·斯宾塞

严复 的更多作品

• 1898天演论