評論
打印
The table before which we sit may be, as the scientist maintains, composed of dancing atoms, but it does not reveal itself to us as anything of the kind, and it is not with dancing atoms but a solid and motionless object that we live. So remote is this “real” table——and most of the other “realities” with which science deals——that it cannot be discussed in terms which have any human value, and though it may receive our purely intellectual credence it cannot be woven into the pattern of life as it is led, in contradistinction to life as we attempt it. Vibrations in the ether(以太) are so totally unlike the color, purple that the gulf between them cannot be bridged, and they are, to all intents and purposes，not one but two separate things of which the second and less “real” must be the most significant for us. And just as the sensation which has led us to attribute all objective reality to a non-existent thing which we called “purple”is more important for human life than the conception of vibrations of a certain frequency; so too the belief in God; however ill founded, has been more important in the life of man than the germ theory of true the latter may be.
We may, if we like, speak of consequence, as certain mystics love to do, of the different levels or orders of truth. We may adopt what is essentially a Platonistic (布拉圖式的) trick of thought and insist upon postulating the existence of external realities which correspond to the needs and modes of human feeling and which, so we may insist, have their being in some part of the universe unreachable by science. But to do so is to make an unwarrantable assumption and to be guilty of the metaphysical fallacy of failing to distinguish between a truth of feeling and that other sort of truth which is described as “truth of correspondence” and it is better perhaps, at least for those of us who have grown up in thought, to steer clear of such confusions and to rest content with the admission that, though the universe with which science deals is the real universe, yet we do not and cannot have any but fleeting and imperfect contacts with it; that the most important part of our lives-our sensations, emotions, desires and aspirations-take place in a universe of illusions which science can attenuate or destroy, but which it is powerless to enrich.
1. The author suggests that in order to bridge the puzzling difference between scientific truth and the world of illusion, the reader should____.
A) try to rid himself of his world of illusion
B) accept his words as being one of illusion
C) apply the scientific method
D) learn to acknowledge both
2. Judging from the ideas and tone of the selection, one may reasonably guess that the author is ____.
A) a humanist B) a pantheist C) a nuclear physicist D) a doctor of medicine
3. According to this passage, a scientist would conceive of a “table” as being ____.
A) a solid motionless object
B) certain characteristic vibrations in “ether”
C) a form fixed in space and time
D) a mass of atoms in motion
4. The topic of this selection is____.
A) the distortion of reality by science
B) the confusion caused by emotions
C) Platonic and contemporary views of truth
D) the place of scientific truth in our lives
5. By “objective reality” (Last line, Para. 1) the author means____.
A) scientific reality
B) a symbolic existence
C) the viewer's experience
D) reality colored by emotion
