zt：苏格兰人

2008-02-04 22:33:30 　　来自: 铁打的饭桶 今天读到了下面一段话，终于解开了困惑好久的苏格兰启蒙运动的迷团： having more to win and less to lose,Celtic adventurers were more to venture themselves in primitive conditions. some of them were also more wiliing to spend time learning exotic new languages, as George Bolge did when he became the first european ever to make an intensive study of Tibetan culture, establishing a close friendship with the Teshu Lama and writing to him regularly after their meeting until his savagely early death back in Calcutta. there was an important sense in which this kind of venturesome behaviour was in keeping with Scottish tradition. Back in the seventeenth century, thousands of Scottish officers had served as mercenaries in Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands and even Poland and Russia. so, for Scots, journeying to a foreign culture to work and fight was a familiar and unfrightening propect.