基础英语(2004年)

business now requires intellectual imagination of the same type as that which in former times has mainly passed into those other occupations.

There is one great difficulty which hampers all the higher types of human endeavor. In modern times this difficulty has even increased in its possibilities for evil. In any large organization the younger men, who are novices, must be set to jobs which consist in carrying out fixed duties in obedience to orders. No president of a large corporation meets his youngest employee at his office door with the offer of the most responsible job which the work of that corporation includes. The young men are set to work at a fixed routine, and only occasionally even see the president as he passes in and out of the building. Such work is a great discipline. It imparts knowledge, and it produces reliability of character; also it is the only work for which the young men, in that novice stage, are fit, and it is the work for which they are hired. There can be no criticism of the custom, but there may be an unfortunate effect – prolonged routine work dulls the imagination.

The way in which a university should function in the preparation for an intellectual career, such as modern business or one of the older professions, is by promoting the imaginative consideration of the various general principles underlying that career. Its students thus pass into their period of technical apprenticeship with their imaginations already practiced in connecting details with general principles. The routine then receives its meaning, and also illuminates the principles which give it that meaning. Hence, instead of a drudgery issuing in a blind rule of thumb, the properly trained man has some hope of obtaining an imagination disciplined by detailed facts and by necessary habits.

Thus the proper function of a university is the imaginative acquisition of knowledge. Apart from this importance of the imagination, there is no reason why business men, and other professional men, should not pick up their facts bit by bit as they want them for particular occasions. A university is imaginative or it is nothing – at least nothing useful.

Questions (Give brief answers)

1. What does Whitehead see as the chief function of a university?

2. Why is a university an ideal place to develop this talent?

3. Why do you think Whitehead chose business administration as his primary example rather

than some more ―speculative‖ study such as philosophy?

4. In paragraph 8, does Whitehead mean that novices in business should be given the

imaginative jobs and the older employees assigned to ―drudgery‖? Explain your answer.

5. Do you agree that ―Fools act on imagination without knowledge; pedants act on knowledge

without imagination‖? Why?

PASSAGE 2

Why Religion, and Why Inter-religious Dialogue?

For better or worse, religion is the only human endeavor that successfully provides us with an all-encompassing model of the pattern which connects our individual lives to the complex regularities of this world, and by extension the cosmos. Our religious traditions allow ordinary people the ability to live and think at levels of integrated complexity that would be otherwise impossible. If we are going to successfully formulate a viable global ethos, i.e., if we are going to succeed in transforming the misguided and destructive values that are leading us to the brink of disaster, we must tap the vast resources of knowledge and potential wisdom manifest in the world‘s diverse religious traditions, as well as the enormous potential for positive change