李安SAT助推10：李安哲学社科人文类阅读32篇wenben

阅读32篇：49-80 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第49篇 Whoever has so far formed his taste, as to be able to relish and feel the beauties of the great masters, has gone a great way in his study; merely from a conscientiousness of his relish of the right, the mind swells with an inward pride, and is almost as powerfully affected, as if it had produced what it admires. Our hearts, frequently warmed in this manner by the contact of those whom we wish to assemble, will undoubtedly catch something of their way of thinking; as we shall receive in our own bosoms some radiation at least of their fire and splendor. That disposition, which is so strong in children, still continues with us, of catching involuntarily the general air and manner of those with whom we are most conversant. 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第50篇 But Fourier is at his greatest in his conception of the history of society. He divides its whole course, thus far, into four stages of evolution – savagery, barbarism, the patriarchate, civilization. This last is identical with the so-called civil, or bourgeois, society of today – i.e., with the social order that came in with the 16th century. He proves “that the civilized stage raises every vice practiced by barbarism in a simple fashion into a form of existence, complex, ambiguous, equivocal, hypocritical” – that civilization moves “in a vicious circle”, in contradictions which it constantly reproduces without being able to solve them; hence it constantly arrives at the very opposite to that which it wants to attain, or pretends to want to attain, so that, e.g., “under civilization poverty is born of superabundance itself”. 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第51篇 …I am not for a moment suggesting that everything that goes on in laboratories will ultimately turn to some unexpected practical use or that an ultimate practical use is its actual justification. Much more am I pleading for the abolition of the word “use” and for the freeing of the human spirit. To be sure, we shall thus free some harmless cranks. To be sure, we shall thus waste some precious dollars. But what is infinitely more important is that we shall be striking the shackles off the human mind and setting it free for the adventures which in our own day have, on the one hand, taken Hale and Rutherford and Einstein and their peers millions upon millions of miles into the uttermost realms of space and, on the other, loosed the boundless energy imprisoned in the atom. What Rutherford and others like Bohr and Millikan have done out of sheer curiosity in the effort to understand the construction of the atom had released forces which may transform human life; but this ultimate and unforseen and unpredictable practical result is not offered as a justification for Rutherford or Einstein or Millikan or Bohr or any of their peers. Let them alone. No educational administrator can possibly direct the channels in which these or other men shall work. The waste, I admit again, looks prodigious. It is not really so. All the waste that could be summed up in developing the science of bacteriology is as nothing compared to the advantages which have accrued from the discoveries of Pasteur, Koch, Ehrlich, Theobald Smith, and scores of others—advantages that could never have accrued if the idea of possible use had permeated their minds. These great artists—for such are scientists and bacteriologists—disseminated the spirit which prevailed in laboratories in which they were simply following the line of their own natural curiosity. 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第52篇 The entire body of German philosophical criticism from Strauss to Stirner is confined to criticism of religious conceptions, claiming to be the absolute redeemer of the world from all evil. Religion was continually regarded and treated as the arch-enemy, as the ultimate cause of all relations repugnant to these philosophers. The critics started from real religion and actual theology. What religious consciousness and a religious conception really meant was determined variously as they went along. Their advance consisted in subsuming the allegedly dominant metaphysical, political, juridical, moral and other conceptions under the class of religious or theological conceptions; and similarly in pronouncing political, juridical, moral consciousness as religious or theological, and the political, juridical, moral man – “man” in the last resort – as religious. The dominance of religion was taken for granted. Gradually every dominant relationship was pronounced a religious relationship and transformed into a cult, a cult of law, a cult of the State, etc. On all sides it was only a question of dogmas and belief in dogmas. The Old Hegelians had comprehended everything as soon as it was reduced to an Hegelian logical category. The Young Hegelians criticised everything by attributing to it religious conceptions or by pronouncing it a theological matter. The Young Hegelians are in agreement with the Old Hegelians in their belief in the rule of religion, of concepts, of a universal principle in the existing world. Only, the one party attacks this dominion as usurpation, while the other extols it as legitimate. 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第53篇 Most farmers attempting to control slugs and snails turn to baited slug poison, or molluscicide, which usually consists of a bran pellet containing either methiocarb or metaldehyde. Both chemicals are neurotoxins that disrupt that part of the brain charged with making the mouth move in a coordinated fashion--the "central pattern generator"--as the slug feeds. Thus, both neurotoxins, while somewhat effective, interfere with the slugs' feeding behavior and limit their ingestion of the poison, increasing the probability that some will stop feeding before receiving a lethal dose. Moreover, slugs are not the only consumers of these poisons: methiocarb may be toxic to a variety of species, including varieties of worms, carabid beetles, and fish. Researchers are experimenting with an alternative compound based on aluminum, which may solve these problems, but this may well have a limited future as we learn more about the hazards of aluminum in the environment. For example, some researchers suggest that acid rain kills trees by mobilizing aluminum in the soil, while others have noted that the human disease Alzheimer's is more prevalent in areas where levels of aluminum in the soil are high. With farmers losing as much as 20 percent of their crops to slugs and snails even after treatment with currently available molluscicides, there is considerable incentive for researchers to come up with better and environmentally safer solutions. 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第54篇 The Black Death, a severe epidemic that ravaged fourteenth-century Europe, has intrigued scholars ever since Francis Gasquet's 1893 study contending that this epidemic greatly intensified the political and religious upheaval that ended the Middle Ages. Thirty-six years later, historian George Coulton agreed but, paradoxically, attributed a silver lining to the Black Death: prosperity engendered by diminished competition for food, shelter, and work led survivors of the epidemic into the Renaissance and subsequent rise of modern Europe. In the 1930s, however, Evgeny Kosminsky and other Marxist historians claimed the epidemic was merely an ancillary factor contributing to a general agrarian crisis stemming primarily from the inevitable decay of European feudalism. In arguing that this decline of feudalism was economically determined, the Marxist asserted that the Black Death was a relatively insignificant factor. This became the prevailing view until after the Second World War, when studies of specific regions and towns revealed astonishing mortality rates ascribed to the epidemic, thus restoring the central role of the Black Death in history. This central role of the Black Death (traditionally attributed to bubonic plague brought from Asia) has been recently challenged from another direction. Building on bacteriologist John Shrewsbury's speculations about mislabeled epidemics, zoologist Graham Twigg employs urban case studies suggesting that the rat population in Europe was both too sparse and insufficiently migratory to have spread plague. Moreover, Twigg disputes the traditional trade-ship explanation for plague transmissions by extrapolating from data on the number of dead rats aboard Nile sailing vessels in 1912. The Black Death, which he conjectures was anthrax instead of bubonic plague, therefore caused far less havoc and fewer deaths than historians typically claim. Although correctly citing the exacting conditions needed to start or spread bubonic plague, Twigg ignores virtually a century of scholarship contradictory to his findings and employs faulty logic in his single-minded approach to the Black Death. His speculative generalizations about the numbers of rats in medieval Europe are based on isolated studies unrepresentative of medieval conditions, while his unconvincing trade-ship argument overlooks land-based caravans, the overland migration of infected rodents, and the many other animals that carry plague. 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第55篇 No man thinks more highly than I do of the patriotism, as well as abilities, of the very worthy gentlemen who have just addressed the House. But different men often see the same subject in different lights; and, therefore, I hope it will not be thought disrespectful to those gentlemen if, entertaining as I do opinions of a character very opposite to theirs, I shall speak forth my sentiments freely and without reserve. This is no time for ceremony. The question before the House is one of awful moment to this country. For my own part, I consider it as nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery; and in proportion to the magnitude of the subject ought to be the freedom of the debate. It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at truth, and fulfill the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country. Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country, and of an act of disloyalty toward the Majesty of Heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings. Mr. President, it is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and, having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it. 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第56篇 But to recognize the French Revolution as a class war, and not simply one between nobility and bourgeoisie, but between nobility, bourgeoisie, and the non-possessors, was, in the year 1802, a most insightful discovery. In 1816, he declares that politics is the science of production, and foretells the complete absorption of politics by economics. The knowledge that economic conditions are the basis of political institutions appears here only in embryo. Yet what is here already very plainly expressed is the idea of the future conversion of political rule over men into an administration of things and a direction of processes of production – that is to say, the “abolition of the state”, about which recently there has been so much noise. Saint-Simon shows the same superiority over his contemporaries, when in 1814, immediately after the entry of the allies into Paris, and again in 1815, during the Hundred Days’ War, he proclaims the alliance of France and England, and then of both of these countries, with Germany, as the only guarantee for the prosperous development and peace of Europe. To preach to the French in 1815 an alliance with the victors of Waterloo required as much courage as historical foresight. 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第57篇 He knew what confronted him if he attacked these –excommunication from official society, the loss of his whole social position. But nothing of this prevented him from attacking them without fear of consequences, and what he had foreseen happened. Banished from official society, with a conspiracy of silence against him in the press, ruined by his unsuccessful Communist experiments in America, in which he sacrificed all his fortune, he turned directly to the working-class and continued working in their midst for 30 years. Every social movement, every real advance in England on behalf of the workers links itself on to the name of Robert Owen. He forced through in 1819, after five years’ fighting, the first law limiting the hours of labor of women and children in factories. He was president of the first Congress at which all the Trade Unions of England united in a single great trade association. He introduced as transition measures to the complete communistic organization of society, on the one hand, cooperative societies for retail trade and production. These have since that time, at least, given practical proof that the merchant and the manufacturer are socially quite unnecessary. On the other hand, he introduced labor bazaars for the exchange of the products of labor through the medium of labor-notes, whose unit was a single hour of work; institutions necessarily doomed to failure, but completely anticipating Proudhon’s bank of exchange of a much later period, and differing entirely from this in that it did not claim to be the panacea for all social ills, but only a first step towards a much more radical revolution of society. 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第58篇 Ecoefficiency (measures to minimize environmental impact through the reduction or elimination of waste from production processes) has become a goal for companies worldwide, with many realizing significant cost savings from such innovations. Peter Senge and Goran Carstedt see this development as laudable but suggest that simply adopting ecoefficiency innovations could actually worsen environmental stresses in the future. Such innovations reduce production waste but do not alter the number of products manufactured nor the waste generated from their use and discard; indeed, most companies invest in ecoefficiency improvements in order to increase profits and growth. Moreover, there is no guarantee that increased economic growth from ecoefficiency will come in similarly ecoefficient ways, since in today’s global markets, greater profits may be turned into investment capital that could easily be reinvested in old-style eco-inefficient industries. Even a vastly more ecoefficient industrial system could, were it to grow much larger, generate more total waste and destroy more habitat and species than would a smaller, less ecoefficient economy. Senge and Carstedt argue that to preserve the global environment and sustain economic growth, businesses must develop a new systemic approach that reduces total material use and total accumulated waste. Focusing exclusively on ecoefficiency, which offers a compelling business case according to established thinking, may distract companies from pursuing radically different products and business models. 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第59篇 In From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932, David Hounshell details the diffusion and assimilation of new technology in the United States among large-scale manufacturers of metalwork products. He also emphasizes the social con-text within which these technological changes took place. Hounshell focuses on how the technology required to produce inter-changeable parts spread from the small-arms industry where it originated to other technically related industries. Hounshell refers to this type of inter-changeable parts production as the "American system" of manufacturing. The new technology and production methods developed by the small-arms industry, with further elaborations and additions, eventually led to the development of Henry Ford's system of mass production. Although historians have long realized that a connection existed between the small-arms and other metalworking industries in the United States, they knew relatively little about how the connection took place. Fortunately, Hounshell's excellent examples make this connection remarkably clear. He points out, for instance, that the speed with which metalworking manufacturers availed themselves of the new technology depended in part on personalities and work traditions within individual firms. The Wheeler and Wilson Company rapidly adopted the system of interchangeable parts production primarily because its superintendent and several key mechanics originally came from the firearms industry. 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第60篇 When a large body strikes a planet or moon, material is ejected, thereby creating a hole in the planet and a local deficit of mass. This deficit shows up as a gravity anomaly: the removal of the material that has been ejected to make the hole results in an area of slightly lower gravity than surrounding areas. One would therefore expect that all of the large multi-ring impact basins on the surface of Earth’s Moon would show such negative gravity anomalies, since they are, essentially, large holes in the lunar surface. Yet data collected in 1994 by the Clementine spacecraft show that many of these lunar basins have no anomalously low gravity and some even have anomalously high gravity. Scientists speculate that early in lunar history, when large impactors struck the Moon’s surface, causing millions of cubic kilometers of crustal debris to be ejected, denser material from the Moon’s mantle rose up beneath the impactors almost immediately, compensating for the ejected material and thus leaving no low gravity anomaly in the resulting basin. Later, however, as the Moon grew cooler and less elastic, rebound from large impactors would have been only partial and incomplete. Thus today such gravitational compensation probably would not occur: the outer layer of the Moon is too cold and stiff. 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第61篇 A pressing need in the study of organizations is for more research into how an organization’s values (an organization’s guiding principles and beliefs as perceived by its members) affect managerial decision-making. Traditional theories have been based on a “rational model,” which focuses on the decision-maker and either ignores the organizational value climate or conveniently assumes that the organization’s values are consistent or clearly prioritized. In reality, however, decisions are shaped not only by a manager’s own values, but also by those of the corporate culture and of organizational superiors. A recent study found that managers’ most stressful decisions involved “value contention” (conflicts among any of these sets of values). Furthermore, different types of organizational value systems were associated with different frequencies of contending values as well as with different types of managerial response. Explicit corporate values, for example, produced a greater percentage of decisions that were stressful due to value contention. Hidden values (those that an organization practices but does not acknowledge or which a superior furtively pursues in opposition to the values of the organization) produced a lower level of value contention. Although explicit values created more value contention, they were nonetheless more likely to produce flexible, well-reasoned decisions. Conversely, managers perplexed by hidden values reported feeling unable to identify an appropriate range of options. 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第62篇 Findings from several studies on corporate mergers and acquisitions during the 1970’s and 1980’s raise questions about why firms initiate and consummate such transactions. One study showed, for example, that acquiring firms were on average unable to maintain acquired firms’ pre-merger levels of profitability. A second study concluded that post-acquisition gains to most acquiring firms were not adequate to cover the premiums paid to obtain acquired firms. A third demonstrated that, following the announcement of a prospective merger, the stock of the prospective acquiring firm tends to increase in value much less than does that of the firm for which it bids. Yet mergers and acquisitions remain common, and bidders continue to assert that their objectives are economic ones. Acquisitions may well have the desirable effect of channeling a nation’s resources efficiently from less to more efficient sectors of its economy, but the individual acquisitions executives arranging these deals must see them as advancing either their own or their companies’ private economic interests. It seems that factors having little to do with corporate economic interests explain acquisitions. These factors may include the incentive of compensation of executives, lack of monitoring by boards of directors, and managerial error in estimating the value of firms targeted for acquisition. Alternatively, the acquisition acts of bidders may derive from modeling: a manager does what other managers do. 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第63篇 Although recent censure of corporate boards of directors as “passive” and “supine” may be excessive, those who criticize board performance have plenty of substantive ammunition. Too many corporate boards fail in their two crucial responsibilities of overseeing long-term company strategy and of selecting, evaluating, and determining appropriate compensation of top management. At times, despite disappointing corporate performance, compensation of chief executive officers reaches indefensibly high levels. nevertheless, suggestions that the government should legislate board reform are premature. There are ample opportunities for boards themselves to improve corporate performance. Most corporate boards’ compensation committees focus primarily on peer-group comparisons. They are content if the pay of top executives approximates that of the executives of competing firms with comparable short-term earnings or even that of executives of competing firms of comparable size. However, mimicking the compensation policy of competitors for the sake of parity means neglecting the value of compensation as a means of stressing long-term performance. By tacitly detaching executive compensation policy from long-term performance, committees harm their companies and the economy as a whole. The committees must develop incentive compensation policies to emphasize long-term performance. For example a board’s compensation committee can, by carefully proportioning straight salary and such short-term and long-term incentives as stock options, encourage top management to pursue a responsible strategy. 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第64篇 While the most abundant and dominant species within a particular ecosystem is often crucial in perpetuating the ecosystem, a “keystone” species, here defined as one whose effects are much larger than would be predicted from its appearance, also play a vital role. But because complex species interactions may be involved, identifying a keystone species by removing the species and observing changes in the ecosystem is problematic. It might seem that certain traits would clearly define a species as a keystone species; for example, Pisaster ochraceus is often a keystone predator because it consumes and suppresses mussel populations, which in the absence of this starfish can be a dominant species. But such predation on a dominant or potentially dominant species occurs in systems that do as well as in systems that do not have species that play keystone roles. Moreover, whereas P. ochraceus occupies an unambiguous keystone role on wave-exposed rocky headlands, in more wave-sheltered habitats the impact of P. ochraceus predation is weak or nonexistent, and at certain sites sand burial is responsible for eliminating mussels. Keystone status appears to depend on context, whether of particular geography or of such factors as community diversity (for example, a reduction in species diversity may thrust more of the remaining species into keystone roles) and length of species interaction (since newly arrived species in particular may dramatically affect ecosystem). 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第65篇 Is it not a curious fact that in a world steeped in irrational hatreds which threaten civilization itself, men and women—old and young—detach themselves wholly or partly from the angry current of daily life to devote themselves to the cultivation of beauty, to the extension of knowledge, to the cure of disease, to the amelioration of suffering, just as though fanatics were not simultaneously engaged in spreading pain, ugliness, and suffering? The world has always been a sorry and confused sort of place—yet poets and artists and scientists have ignored the factors that would, if attended to, paralyze them. From a practical point of view, intellectual and spiritual life is, on the surface, a useless form of activity, in which men indulge because they procure for themselves greater satisfactions than are otherwise obtainable. In this paper I shall concern myself with the question of the extent to which the pursuit of these useless satisfactions proves unexpectedly the source from which undreamed-of utility is derived… 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第66篇 The Utopians’ mode of thought has for a long time governed the Socialist ideas of the 19th century, and still governs some of them. Until very recently, all French and English Socialists did homage to it. The earlier German Communism, including that of Weitling, was of the same school. To all these, Socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power. And as an absolute truth is independent of time, space, and of the historical development of man, it is a mere accident when and where it is discovered. With all this, absolute truth, reason, and justice are different with the founder of each different school. And as each one’s special kind of absolute truth, reason, and justice is again conditioned by his subjective understanding, his conditions of existence, the measure of his knowledge and his intellectual training, there is no other ending possible in this conflict of absolute truths than that they shall be mutually exclusive of one another. Hence, from this nothing could come but a kind of eclectic, average Socialism, which, as a matter of fact, has up to the present time dominated the minds of most of the socialist workers in France and England. To make a science of Socialism, it had first to be placed upon a real basis. 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第67篇 “Mr. Eastman, Marconi was inevitable. The real credit for everything that has been done in the field of wireless belongs, as far as such fundamental credit can be definitely assigned to anyone, to Professor Clerk Maxwell, who in 1865 carried out certain abstruse and remote calculations in the field of magnetism and electricity. Maxwell reproduced his abstract equations in a treatise published in 1873. At the next meeting of the British Association Professor H. J. S. Smith of Oxford declared that ‘no mathematician can turn over the pages of these volumes without realizing that they contain a theory which has already added largely to the methods and resources of pure mathematics.’ Other discoveries supplemented Maxwell’s theoretical work during the next fifteen years. Finally in 1887 and 1888 the scientific problem still remaining—the detection and demonstration of the electromagnetic waves which are the carriers of wireless signals—was solved by Heinrich Hertz, a worker in Helmholtz’s laboratory in Berlin. Neither Maxwell nor Hertz had any concern about the utility of their work; no such thought ever entered their minds. They had no practical objective. The inventor in the legal sense was of course Marconi, but what did Marconi invent? Merely the last technical detail, mainly the now obsolete receiving device called coherer, almost universally discarded.? 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第68篇 Hertz and Maxwell could invent nothing, but it was their useless theoretical work which was seized upon by a clever technician and which has created new means for communication, utility, and amusement by which men whose merits are relatively slight have obtained fame and earned millions. Who were the useful men? Not Marconi, but Clerk Maxwell and Heinrich Hertz. Hertz and Maxwell were geniuses without thought of use. Marconi was a clever inventor with no thought but use. The mention of Hertz’s name recalled to Mr. Eastman the Hertzian waves, and I suggested that he might ask the physicists of the University of Rochester precisely what Hertz and Maxwell had done; but one thing I said he could be sure of, namely, that they had done their work without thought of use and that throughout the whole history of science most of the really great discoveries which had ultimately proved to be beneficial to mankind had been made by men and women who were driven not by the desire to be useful but merely the desire to satisfy their curiosity. 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第69篇 Many managers are influenced by dangerous myths about pay that lead to counterproductive decisions about how their companies compensate employees. One such myth is that labor rates, the rate per hour paid to workers, are identical with labor costs, the money spent on labor in relation to the productivity of the labor force. This myth leads to the assumption that a company can simply lower its labor costs by cutting wages. But labor costs and labor rates are not in fact the same: one company could pay its workers considerably more than another and yet have lower labor costs if that company’s productivity were higher due to the talent of its workforce, the efficiency of its work processes, or other factors. The confusion of costs with rates persists partly because labor rates are a convenient target for managers who want to make an impact on their company’s budgets. Because labor rates are highly visible, managers can easily compare their company’s rates with those of competitors. Furthermore, labor rates often appear to be a company’s most malleable financial variable: cutting wages appears an easier way to control costs than such options as reconfiguring work processes or altering product design. The myth that labor rates and labor costs are equivalent is supported by business journalists, who frequently confound the two. For example, prominent business journals often remark on the “high” cost of German labor, citing as evidence the average amount paid to German workers. The myth is also perpetuated by the compensation-consulting industry, which has its own incentives to keep such myths alive. First, although some of these consulting firms have recently broadened their practices beyond the area of compensation, their mainstay continues to be advising companies on changing their compensation practices. Suggesting that a company’s performance can be improved in some other way than by altering its pay system may be empirically correct but contrary to the consultants’ interests. Furthermore, changes to the compensation system may appear to be simpler to implement than changes to other aspects of an organization, so managers are more likely to find such advice from consultants palatable. Finally, to the extant that changes in compensation create new problems, the consultants will continue to have work solving the problems that result from their advice. 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第70篇 In the largest Dallas communities, some individuals were buried in the earthen mounds that served as sub-structures for buildings important to civic and religious affairs. These burials included quantities of finely carried items made of nonlocal material, denoting the high political standing of those interred. Burials of lower-status individuals contained primarily utilitarian items such as cooking vessels and chipped stone tools and are located in more remote sections of the settlements. The burials actually formed a pattern, the tallest skeletons being found in the mounds, and the heights declining as burials became more distant from the mounds. While it is possible that taller people were simply more successful in achieving high social standing, it is more likely that a number of stresses, including those resulting from a relatively poor diet, which could affect stature, were common among the lower-status groups Excavations indicate that where food categories made up the bulk of the population’s diet: agricultural crops cultivated in the fertile alluvial soils where the communities were located, game, and wild edible plants, primarily nuts. Information about dietary variation among community members is derived by analyzing trace elements in human bone. Higher than normal levels of manganese, strontium, and vanadium probably indicate a less nutritious diet heavily dependent on edible plants. Very low concentrations of vanadium, which is scarce in meats and somewhat lower in nuts than in other plant resources, are good evidence of meat consumption and thus a better balanced-diet. As expected, vanadium was found in considerably greater quantities in skeletons in the burials of lower-status groups. 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第71篇 I am not criticizing institutions like schools of engineering or law in which the usefulness motive necessarily predominates. Not infrequently the tables are turned, and practical difficulties encountered in industry or in laboratories stimulate theoretical inquiries which may or may not solve the problems by which they were suggested, but may also open up new vistas, useless at the moment, but pregnant with future achievements, practical and theoretical. With the rapid accumulation of “useless” or theoretic knowledge a situation has been created in which it has become increasingly possible to attack practical problems in a scientific spirit. Not only inventors, but “pure” scientists have indulged in this sport. I have mentioned Marconi, an inventor, who, while a benefactor to the human race, as a matter of fact merely “picked other men’s brains.” Edison belongs to the same category. Pasteur was different. He was a great scientist; but he was not averse to attacking practical problems—such as the condition of French grapevines or the problems of beer-brewing—and not only solving the immediate difficulty, but also wresting from the practical problem some far-reaching theoretic conclusion, “useless? at the moment, but likely in some unforeseen manner to be “useful? later. Ehrlich, fundamentally speculative in his curiosity, turned fiercely upon the problem of syphilis and doggedly pursued it until a solution of immediate practical use—the discovery of salvarsan—was found. The discoveries of insulin by Banting for use in diabetes and of liver extract by Minot and Whipple for use in pernicious anemia belong in the same category: both were made by thoroughly scientific men, who realized that much “useless” knowledge had been piled up by men unconcerned with its practical bearings, but that the time was now ripe to raise practical questions in a scientific manner. 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第72篇 Since the Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men (just as the Old Hegelians declared them the true bonds of human society) it is evident that the Young Hegelians have to fight only against these illusions of consciousness. Since, according to their fantasy, the relationships of men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are products of their consciousness, the Young Hegelians logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e. to recognise it by means of another interpretation. The Young-Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly “world-shattering" statements, are the staunchest conservatives. The most recent of them have found the correct expression for their activity when they declare they are only fighting against “phrases.” They forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world. The only results which this philosophic criticism could achieve were a few (and at that thoroughly one-sided) elucidations of Christianity from the point of view of religious history; all the rest of their assertions are only further embellishments of their claim to have furnished, in these unimportant elucidations, discoveries of universal importance. It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their own material surroundings. 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第73篇 If in Saint-Simon we find a comprehensive breadth of view, by virtue of which almost all the ideas of later Socialists that are not strictly economic are found in him in embryo, we find in Fourier a criticism of the existing conditions of society, genuinely French and witty, but not upon that account any the less thorough. Fourier takes the bourgeoisie, their inspired prophets before the Revolution, and their interested eulogists after it, at their own word. He lays bare remorselessly the material and moral misery of the bourgeois world. He confronts it with the earlier philosophers’ dazzling promises of a society in which reason alone should reign, of a civilization in which happiness should be universal, of an illimitable human perfectibility, and with the rose-colored phraseology of the bourgeois ideologists of his time. He points out how everywhere the most pitiful reality corresponds with the most high-sounding phrases, and he overwhelms this hopeless fiasco of phrases with his mordant sarcasm. Fourier is not only a critic, his imperturbably serene nature makes him a satirist, and assuredly one of the greatest satirists of all time. He depicts, with equal power and charm, the swindling speculations that blossomed out upon the downfall of the Revolution, and the shopkeeping spirit prevalent in, and characteristic of, French commerce at that time. Still more masterly is his criticism of the bourgeois form of the relations between sexes, and the position of woman in bourgeois society. He was the first to declare that in any given society the degree of woman’s emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation. 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第75篇 The traditional lack of critical regard for Vigee-Lebrun may actually tell us more about modern tastes than about the artist's limitations. Mesmerized by the passionate revolutionary imagery of Vigee-Lebrun's contemporaries—such as Jacques-Louis David—art historians fail to appreciate the subtle nuances and gentilities of her portraits, finding them tame and uninspired. Vigee-Lebrun's paintings suggest a quiet optimism, whereas the modern imagination is more sparked by the doubt and self-questioning evident in Romantic portraiture. Her posthumous reputation has also suffered from her political orientation: she continued to paint beautifully wrought portraits of the aristocracy with flair and conviction long after the French Revolution had rendered such confidence obsolete, leading critics to assert that Vigee-Lebrun's art was both reactionary and tediously repetitive. In fact, if one can surmount the modern tendency to denigrate royalist culture, one can appreciate in Vigee-Lebrun's paintings the authentic voice of the best of the ancient regime (old royal regime):modulated, amused, and thoroughly cultivated. By presenting many of the leading figures of her time as they (80) wished to be presented, the art of Vigee-Lebrun contributes to our understanding of the period in which she lived. 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第76篇 One of the most striking features of Greek urban life from the second century B.C. to the third century A.D. was the prominent public role played by female members of the wealthy elites. In Asia Minor, where city life was most developed during this period, the phenomenon was most pronounced, but it was present on the Greek mainland as well. Earlier, the only public roles that Greek women had played were those of priestesses and similar religious functionaries. But from the second century B.C. on, positions as magistrates and other public officials, previously reserved for men, were often held by women. Women also began to perform /eitourgia---the financial duties expected of the rich and, as wealthy men had long done, women became active as voluntary benefactors, funding the construction of temples, theaters, and public baths. Moreover, the role of the priesthood in public life greatly increased as priests and priestesses, drawn from the wealthy elites, began spending large sums of money on festivals, banquets, and games in honor of the gods and began financing the building and restoration of temples. 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第77篇 Investigators initially believed that monkeys would compete for any re-source in the environment: hungry monkeys would fight over food, thirsty monkeys would fight over water, and, in general, any time more than one monkey in a group sought the same incentive simultaneously, a dispute would result and would be resolved through some form of aggression. However, the motivating force of com-petition for incentives began to be doubted when experiments like South-wick's on the reduction of space or the withholding of food failed to produce more than temporary increases in intra-group aggression. Indeed, food deprivation not only failed to increase aggression but in some cases actually resulted in decreased frequencies of aggression. 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第78篇 Prior to the Civil War, African American writers patterned their works after those of White writers. With the exception of Martin Delany, the early novelists—William Wells Brown, Frank Webb, and Frances Ellen Watkins—and poets—Phillis Wheatley, Jupiter Hammon, and George Moses Horton—took such famous British authors as Pope, Carlyle, Mill, and Byron as models. These African American writers were—Webb excepted—abolitionists who, in fighting for emancipation, adopted the language of White abolitionists. Somewhat more surprisingly, they also adopted the idealistic belief that, once slavery had ended, a better world would soon arise from the old world's ashes. One finds this idealistic conception in Frederick Douglass' speeches between 1863 and 1865, as well as in Wheatley's poetry and in Brown's novels. How can one explain their firm belief in this romantic dream? The answer is that for them, in the period until 1865, slavery presented the major conundrum, not racism: an end to slavery was viewed as an adequate solution to the overall problem between African Americans and Whites. 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第79篇 In complex organisms, the stability of the brain's functioning depends on the maintenance of a constant internal environment, so constant, in fact, that it must be protected from even transient changes in blood composition that might induce such problems as uncontrollable nervous activity in the brain. Such maintenance is the work of the blood-brain barrier. This barrier is a continuous wall formed by the endothelial cells of the capillaries that supply blood to the brain. At first glance, the blood-brain barrier, which guards against even the small fluctuations in concentrations of hormones, amino acids, and potassium ions that occur elsewhere in the body, would seem too efficient a regulator. That is, in keeping the brain rigorously isolated from transient changes in the blood, it threatens to deprive the brain of essentials, like nutrients. How, then, does the brain get nourished? This is precisely the question re-searchers posed, once they had established the existence and anatomical basis of the blood-brain barrier. The first step was to determine which substances, in general, can traverse the barrier and which are blocked by it. It was found that several chemical properties help determine how easily a molecule may enter the brain. The most significant factor is lipid solubility, which is roughly equivalent to how easily a substance dissolves in oil. Lipid-soluble molecules readily diffuse across the blood-brain barrier and enter the brain. Compounds that are highly soluble in water, on the other hand, tend not to be taken up into the brain, and this is true across a range of water-soluble molecules extending from proteins as large as albumin to ions as small as sodium. 李安SAT哲学社科人文类阅读第80篇 A recent generation of historians of science, far from portraying accepted scientific views as objectively accurate reflections of a natural world, explain the acceptance of such views in terms of the ideological biases of certain influential scientists or the institutional and rhetorical power such scientists wield. As an example of ideological bias, it has been argued that Pasteur rejected the theory of spontaneous generation not because of experimental evidence but because he rejected the materialist ideology implicit in that doctrine. These historians seem to find allies in certain philosophers of science who argue that scientific views are not imposed by reality but are free inventions of creative minds, and that scientific claims are never more than brave conjectures, always subject to inevitable future falsification. While these philosophers of science themselves would not be likely to have much truck with the recent historians, it is an easy step from their views to the extremism of the historians. While this rejection of the traditional belief that scientific views are objective reflections of the world may be fashionable, it is deeply implausible. We now know, for example, that water is made of hydrogen and oxygen and that parents each contribute one-half of their children's complement of genes. I do not believe any serious-minded and informed person can claim that these statements are 30) not factual descriptions of the world or that they will inevitably be falsified.