2. 职称英语
  3. The process of transforming all direct experience into imaginary or into tha

The process of transforming all direct experience into imaginary or into tha

游客2023-12-03  25
问题     The process of transforming all direct experience into imaginary or into that supreme mode of symbolic expression, language, has so completely taken possession of the human mind that it is not only a special talent but a dominant, organic need. All our sense impressions leave their traces in our memory not only as signs disposing our practical reaction in the future but also as symbols, images representing our idea of things: and the tendency to manipulate ideas, to combine and abstract, mix and extend them by playing with symbols, is man’s outstanding characteristic. It seems to be what his brain most naturally and spontaneously does. Therefore his primitive mental function is not judging reality, but dreaming his desires.
    Dreaming is apparently a basic function of human brains, for it is free and unexhausting like our metabolism, heartbeat, and breath. It is easier to dream than not to dream, as it is easier to breathe than to refrain from breathing. The symbolic character of dreams is fairly well established. Symbol mongering, on this ineffectual, uncritical level, seems to be instinctive, the fulfillment of an elementary need rather than the purposeful exercise of a high and difficult talent.
    The special power of man’s mind rests on the evolution of this special activity, not on any transcendently high development of animal intelligence. We are not immeasurably higher than other animals: we are different. We have a biological need and with it a biological gift that they do not share.
    Because man has not only the ability but the constant need of conceiving what has happened to him, what surrounds him, what is demanded of him—in short, of symbolizing nature, himself, and his hopes and fears—he has a constant and crying need of expression. What he cannot express, he cannot conceive: what he cannot conceive is chaos, and fills him with terror.
    If we bear in mind this all-important craving for expression we get a new picture of man’s behavior: for from this trait spring his powers and his weaknesses. The process of symbolic transformation that all our experiences undergo is nothing more or less than the process of conception, underlying the human faculties of abstraction and imagination.
    When we are faced with a strange or difficult situation, we cannot react directly, as other creatures do, with flight, aggression, or any such simple instinctive pattern. Our whole reaction depends on how we manage to conceive the situation—whether we cast it in a definite dramatic form, whether we see it as a disaster, a fulfillment of doom, or a fiat of the Devine Will. In words or dreamlike images, in artistic or religious or even in cynical form, we must construe the events of life. There is great virtue in the figure of speech, "I can make nothing of it," to express a failure to understand something. Thought and memory are processes of making the thought content and memory image: the pattern of our ideas is given by the symbols through which we express them. And in the course of manipulating those symbols we inevitably distort the original experience, as we abstract certain features of it, embroider and reinforce those features with other ideas, until the conception we project on the screen of memory is quite different from anything in with our real history.
    Conception is a necessary and elementary process: what we do with our conceptions is another story. That is the entire history of human culture—of intelligence and morality, folly and superstition, ritual, language, and the arts—all the phenomena that set man apart from, and above, the rest of animal kingdom. As the religious mind has to make all human history a drama of sins and salvation in order to define its own moral attitudes, so a scientist wrestles with the mere presentation of "the facts" before he can reason about them. The process of envisaging facts, values, hopes, and fears underlies our whole behavior pattern: and this process is reflected in the evolution of an extraordinary phenomenon found always, and only, in human societies—the phenomenon of language. [br] The "biological need" mentioned in Paragraph Three refers to______.
选项 A、the organic need for food and nutrition
B、the elementary need for self-fulfillment
C、the instinctive need for processing symbols
D、the constant need for expression
答案 D
解析 语义理解题。由题干定位至第三段，要猜测biological need在该句中的含义，须结合上下文理解。由第四段第一句Because…he has a constant and crying need of expression．可知，该句是对第三段末句中的biological need做出的解释，故[D]为正确答案。文章自始至终没有提到food and nutrition，故排除[A]；由第二段第四句Symbol mongering…seems to be instinctive，the fulfillment of an elementary need…可知，这种基本需求的满足来自于对符号的使用，并不是自我实现，故排除[B]；第四段第一句提到…the constant need of conceiving…and his hopesand fears，即对周围所发生事物的想象是人类长久以来的一种需求……对自然、人类，以及希望与恐惧等情感的符号化表达，并不是指对加工符号的本能需求，故排除[C]。
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