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I arrived in America full of pessimism, but I soon made friends and came to be very fond of the country and its people. The naive optimism and cheerfulness of the Americans impressed me most favorably. In this land there seemed nothing which could not be achieved by human intelligence and effort. I could not escape the contagion of this cheerful outlook on life, which, in the course of a few years, gradually cured my premature senility.

When I went to see a football game for the first time, I sat there philosophically amused by the roughness of the game and by the wild yells and cheers which seemed to me quite beneath the dignity of the university student. But, as the struggle became more and more exciting, I began to catch the enthusiasm. Then, accidentally turning my head, I saw the white-haired professor of botany, Mr. W. W. Rowlee, cheering and yelling in all heartiness, and I felt so ashamed of myself that I was soon cheering enthusiastically with the crowd.

Even during the darkest days in the first years of the Chinese Republic, I managed to keep up my good cheer. In a letter written to a Chinese friend, I said: “Nothing is hopeless except when you and I give it up as hopeless.” In my diaries, I wrote down such quotations as this from Clough: “If hopes are dupes, fears are liars.” Or this, in my own Chinese translation, from Browning:

One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,

Never doubted clouds would break,

Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake.

In January, 1914， I wrote this entry in my diary: “I believe that the greatest thing I have learned since leaving China is this optimistic philosophy of life.” In 1915 I was awarded the Hiram Corson Prize for the best essay on Robert Browning. The subject of my essay was “In Defense of Browning’s Optimism.” I think it was largely my gradually changed outlook on life that made me speak with a sense of conviction in taking up his defense.

I began my university career as a student in the New York State College of Agriculture at Cornell University. My choice was based on the belief then current in China that a Chinese student must learn some useful art, and literature and philosophy were not considered of any practical use. But there was also an economic motive: the College of Agriculture then charged no tuition fee and I thought I might be able to save a part of my monthly allowance to send to my mother.

I had had no experience on a farm and my heart was not in agriculture. The freshman courses in English Literature and German interested me far more than Farm Practice and Pomology. After hesitating for a year and a half, I finally transferred to the College of Arts and Sciences at the penalty of paying four semesters’ tuition fee at once, which cost me 8 months’ privation. But I felt more at home in my new studies and have never regretted the change.

A course in the History of European Philosophy—under that inspiring teacher, the late Professor J. E. Creighton—led me to major in Philosophy. I also took a keen interest in English Literature and Political Science. The Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell was a stronghold of Idealism. Under its guidance I read the more important works of the classical philosophers of ancient and modern times. I also read these works of such later Idealists as Bradley and Bosanquet, but their problems never interested me.

In 1915 I went to Columbia University and studied under Professor John Dewey until the summer of 1917， when I returned to China. Under Dewey’s inspiration, I wrote my dissertation on “The Development of the Logical Method in Ancient China,” which made me reread the philosophical writings of ancient China and laid the foundation for all my later researches in the history of Chinese thought.

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During my 7 years in America, I had many extra-curricular activities which probably had as much influence on my life and thought as my university work.

When later the International Polity Clubs were founded, under the leadership of Nasmyth and Norman Angell, I was one of the most active members and participated in their first two annual conferences. In 1916 I was awarded the International Polity Club Prize for my essay on “Is There a Substitute for Force in International Relations?” in which I expounded the philosophy of a league of nations on the idea of law as organized force.

My reading of Ibsen, John Morley, and Huxley taught me the importance of honest thinking and honest speaking. I read all of Ibsen’s plays and was particularly pleased byAn Enemy of the People. Morley’s essay, “On Compromise,” first recommended to me by my good friend Miss Edith Clifford Williams, has remained one of the most important spiritual influences on my life. Morley has taught me that “a principle, if it be sound, represents one of the larger expediencies. To abandon that for the sake of some seeming expediency of the hour, is to sacrifice the greater good for the less.Nothing is so sure to impoverish an epoch, to deprive conduct of nobleness, and character of elevation.”

Huxley goes still further and teaches a method of intellectual honesty. He merely says: “Give me such evidence as would justify me in believing anything else, and I will believe that （the immortality of man）. It is no use to talk to me of analogies and probabilities. I know what I mean when I say I believe in the law of the inversed square, and I will not rest my life and my hopes upon weaker convictions.” Huxley has also said, “The most sacred act of a man’s life is to say and to feel ‘I believe such and such to be true.’ All the greatest rewards, and all the heaviest penalties of existence, cling upon that act.”

It is from Professor Dewey that I have learned that the most sacred responsibility of a man’s life is to endeavor tothink well. To think sluggishly, to think without strict regard to the antecedents and consequences of thought, to accept ready-made and unanalyzed concepts as premises of thinking, to allow personal factors unconsciously to influence one’s thinking, or to fail to test one’s ideas by working out their results is to be intellectually irresponsible. All the greatest discoveries of truth, and all the greatest calamities in history, depend upon this.

Dewey has given us a philosophy of thinking which treats thinking as an art, as a technique. And inHow We ThinandEssays in Experimental Logiche has worked out this technique which I have found to be true not only of the discoveries in the experimental sciences, but also of the best researches in the historical sciences, such as textual criticism, philological reconstruction, and higher criticism. In all these fields, the best results have been achieved by the same technique, which in its essence consists of a boldness in suggesting hypotheses coupled with a most solicitous regard for control and verification. This laboratory technique of thinking deserves the name of Creative Intelligence because it is truly creative in the exercise of imagination and ingenuity in seeking evidence and devising experiment and in the satisfactory results that flow from the successful fruition of thinking.

Curiously enough, this instrumental logic has turned me into a historical research worker. I have learned to think genetically and this genetic habit of thinking has been the key to success in all my subsequent work in the history of thought and literature. More curious still, this historical way of thinking has not made me a conservative but always a progressive. For instance, my arguments for the literary revolution in China have been entirely based upon the undeniable facts of historical evolution and they have been so far unanswerable by my opponents.

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The death of my mother in November, 1918， was the occasion which led to the first formulation of the credo for which I had been groping in the vast world for over 14 years. It was published in February, 1919， in an essay entitled “Immortality, My Religion.”

Because of my early boyhood readings I had long since rejected the idea of personal survival after death. For many years I had contented myself with an ancient doctrine of “Three Immortalities”which I found in the Tso Commentary on theChun Chiu， where it was recorded that the wise statesman Shu-sin Pao declared in the year 548 B.C. （when Confucius was only 3 years old） that there were three kinds of immortality: the immortality of Virtue, of Service, and of Wise Speech. “These are not forgotten with length of time and that is what is meant by immortality after death.” Thisdoctrine attracted me so much that I often spoke of it to my foreign friends and gave to it the name “the doctrine of the immortality of the three W’s （Worth, Work, and Words）.”

My mother’s death set me thinking afresh on this problem, and I began to feel that the doctrine of the Three Immortalities was in need of revision. It is defective, in the first place, in being too exclusive. How many people are there in this world whose achievements in virtue, in service, and in literary and philosophical wisdom cannot be forgotten with length of time? Christopher Columbus, for example, may be immortal, but how about the other members of his crew? How about the men who built his ships or furnished his tools, or the many pioneers who had paved the way for him either by courageous thinking or by successful or unsuccessful explorations of the seas? How much, in short, must one achieve in order to attain immortality?

In the second place, this doctrine fails to furnish any negative check on human conduct. Virtue is immortal, but how about vice? Shall we again resort to the belief in Judgment Day and Hell Fire?

As I reviewed the life of my dead mother, whose activities had never gone beyond the trivial details of the home but whose influence could be clearly seen on the faces of those men and women who came to mourn her death, and as I recalled the personal influence of my father on her whole life and its lasting effect on myself, I came to the conviction thateverythingis immortal. Everything that we are, everything that we do, and everything that we say is immortal in the sense that it has its effect somewhere in this world, and that effect in turn will have its results some- where else, and the thing goes on in infinite time and space.

As Leibnitz once said, “Each body feels all that passes in the universe, so that he who sees all may read in each that which passes everywhere else, and even that which has been and shall be, discerning in the present that which is removed in time as well as in space.” We do not see all, but everything is there, reaching into the infinite. A man is what he eats, and the work of the Dakota farmer,the California fruit grower, and a million other food providers lives in him. A man is what he thinks, and everyone who has influenced him—from Socrates, Plato, and Confucius down to his parish preacher and his nursery governess—lives in him. A man is also what he enjoys, and the work of numberless artists and entertainers, living or long dead, renowned or nameless, sublime or vulgar, lives in him. And so onad infinitu.

Fourteen centuries ago a man wrote an essay on “The Destructibility of the Soul” which was considered so sacrilegious that his Emperor ordered 70 great scholars to refute it and it was refuted. But 500 years later a historian recorded a summary of this sacrilegious essay in his great history. And another 900 years passed. Then a little boy of 11 chanced upon this brief summary of 35 words, and these 35 words, after being buried for 1，400 years, suddenly became alive and are living in him and through him in the lives of thousands of men and women.

In 1912 there came to my Alma Mater an English lecturer who gave an address on the impossibility of founding a republic in China. His lecture struck me then as quite absurd, but I was amused by his peculiar pronunciation of the vowelo， and I sat there imitating it for my own entertainment. His speech has long been forgotten, but somehow his pronunciation of the vowelohas stuck by me all these years and is probably now on the tongue of hundreds of my students without anyone’s ever being aware that it came through my mischievous mimicking of Mr. J. O. P. Bland. And Mr. Bland never knew it.

Twenty-five centuries ago there died a beggar in a valley of the Himalaya Mountains. His body was decomposing by the roadside. There came a young prince who saw the horrifying scene and was set to thinking. He thought over the impermanence of life and of everything else, and decided to leave his family and go to the wilderness to think out a way for his own salvation and that of mankind. Years later he emerged from the wilderness as Buddha the Enlightened One and proclaimed to the world the way he had found for its salvation. Thus even the decomposition of the dead body of a beggar has unwittingly contributed its part to the founding of one of the greatest religions of the world.

This line of reasoning led me to what may be called the religion of Social Immortality, because it is essentially based on the idea that the individual self, which is the product of the accumulated effect of the social self, leaves an indelible mark of everything it is and everything it does upon that larger self which may be termed Society, or Humanity, or the Great Being. The individual may die, but he lives on in this Great Self which is immortal. All his virtue and vice, merit and sin, all his action and thought and speech, significant or trivial, right or wrong, for good or for evil—everything lives in the effect it produces on the Great Self. This Great Self lives forever as the everlasting monumental testimony of the triumphs and failures of the numberless individual selves.

This conception of Social Immortality is more satisfactory than the ancient Chinese doctrine of the Three Immortalities in that it includes the lowly and the insignificant as well as the heroes and sages, vice as well as virtue, crime as well as meritorious service. And it is this recognition of the immortality of evil as well as of good that constitutes the moral sanction of the doctrine. The decay of a dead body may found a religion, but it may also plague a whole continent. A chance remark of a barmaid may lead to the sudden enlightenment of a Zen monk, but a wrong theory of political or social reconstruction may cause centuries of bloodshed. The discovery of a microscopic bacillus may benefit millions of people,but a tiny sputum from a consumptive may kill multitudes and generations.

Truly the evil that men do lives after them! It is the clear recognition of the consequences of conduct that constitutes our sense of moral responsibility. The individual self owes a tremendous debt to the greater Social Self, and it is his duty to hold himself responsible to it for everything he does or thinks or is. Humanity is what it is by the wisdom and folly of our fathers, but we shall be judged by what humanity will be when we shall have played our part. Shall we say, “After us, the deluge”? Or shall we say, “After us, the millennium” ?

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In 1923 I had another occasion to formulate my credo in a more general way. An article on “Science and Our Philosophy of Life” by the geologist Mr. V. K. Ting, published in a weekly paper edited by myself, had started a long controversy which lasted almost a whole year. Practically every thinker of any standing in China had taken part in it. When the controversial literature was collected by some enterprising publisher at the end of 1923， it amounted to over 250，000 words. I was asked to write an introduction to this collection. My introductory essay added another 10，000 words to this already voluminous collection and concluded with what I proposed as “a framework for a new philosophy of the universe and life,” to which, however, some of the hostile Christian missionaries have mischievously given the name of “Hu Shih’s New Decalogue.” I now translate it for what it is worth:

1. On the basis of our knowledge of astronomy and physics, we should recognize that the world of space is infinitely large

2. On the basis of our geological and paleontological knowledge, we should rec- ognize that the universe extends over infinite time

3. On the basis of all our verifiable scientific knowledge we shoul recognize that the universe and everything in it follow natural laws of movement and change— “natural” in the Chinese sense of “being so of themselves”—and that there is no need for the concept of a supernatural Ruler or Creator.

4. On the basis of the biological sciences, we should recognize the terrific waste- fulness and brutality in the struggle for existence in the biological world, and consequently the untenability of the hypothesis of a benevolent Ruler.

5. On the basis of the biological, physiological, and psychological sciences, we should recognize that man is only one species in the animal kingdom and differs from the other species only in degree, but not inkind.

6. On the basis of the knowledge derived from anthropology, sociology, and the biological sciences, we should understand the history and causes of the evolu- tion of living organisms and of human society.

7. On the basis of the biological and psychological sciences, we should recognize that all psychological phenomena are explainable through the law of causality.

8. On the basis of biological and historical knowledge, we should recognize that morality and religion are subject to change, and that the causes of such change can be scientifically studied

9. On the basis of our newer knowledge of physics and chemistry, we should recognize that matter is full of motion and not static.

10. On the basis of biological, sociological, and historical knowledge, we should recognize that the individual self is subject to death and decay, but the sum total of individual achievement, for better or for worse, lives on in the immortality of the Larger Self; that to live for the sake of the species and posterity is religion of the highest kind; and that those religions which seek a future life either in Heaven or in the Pure Land, are selfish religions

“This new credo,

I concluded,

“is a hypothesis founded on the generally accepted scientific knowledge of the last two or three hundred years. To avoid unnecessary controversy, I propose to call it, not ‘a scientific credo,’ but merely ‘the Naturalistic Conception of Life and the Universe.’

“In this naturalistic universe, in this universe of infinite space and time, man, the two-handed animal whose average height is about five feet and a half and whose age rarely exceeds a hundred years, is indeed a mere infinitesimal microbe. In this naturalistic universe, where every motion in the heavens has its regular course and every change follows laws of nature, where causality governs man’s life and the struggle for existence spurs his activities—in such a universe man has very little freedom indeed.

“Yet this tiny animal of two hands has his proper place and worth in that world of infinite magnitude. Making good use of his hands and a large brain, he has actually succeeded in making a number of tools, thinking out ways and means, and creating his own civilization. He has not only domesticated the wild animals, but he has also studied and discovered a considerable number of the secrets and laws of nature by means of which he has become a master of the natural forces and is now ordering electricity to drive his carriage and ether to deliver his message.

“The increase of his knowledge has extended his power, but it has also widened his vision and elevated his imagination. There were times when he worshiped stones and animals and was afraid of the gods and ghosts. But he is now moving away from these childish habits, and is slowly coming to a realization that the infinity of space only enhances his aesthetic appreciation of the universe, the infinite length of geological and archaeological time only makes him better understand the terrific hardship his forefathers had to encounter in building up this human inheritance, and the regularity of the movements and changes in the heavens and on earth only furnishes him the key to his dominion over nature.

“Even the absolute universality of the law of causality does not necessarily limit his freedom, because the law of causality not only enables him to explain the past and predict the future, but also encourages him to use his intelligence to create new causes and attain new results. Even the apparent cruelty in the struggle for existence does not necessarily make him a hardened brute; on the contrary, it may intensify his sympathy for his fellow men, make him believe more firmly in the necessity of cooperation, and convince him of the importance of conscious human endeavor as the only means of reducing the brutality and wastefulness of the natural struggles. In short, this naturalistic conception of the universe and life is not necessarily devoid of beauty, of poetry, of moral responsibility, and of the fullest opportunity for the exercise of the creative intelligence of man.”

[1] 本文收录胡适于1931年1、2月份在美国的Forum杂志上连载两期的英文自述。“What I Believe”为Forum杂志的一个专题，爱因斯坦、罗素、杜威等都曾为该专题撰稿。胡适的这篇自述原名应为“My credo and Its Evolution”，据胡适日记记载成文于1930年3月4日，发表时改为“What I Believe”。本文内容大多与1933年出版的《四十自述》相同或相通，可谓《四十自述》写作的蓝本，故附于此。