TEXT B Shams and delusions are
estimated for soundest troths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily
observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare
with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’
entertainments. If we respected only what is inevitable and has a fight to be,
music and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and
wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and
absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of
the reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime. By closing
the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish
and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is
built on purely illusory foundations. Children, who play life, discern its true
law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who
thinks that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure. I
have read in a Hindoo book, that "there was a king’s son, who, being expelled in
infancy from his native city, was brought up by a forester, and growing up to
maturity in that state, imagined himself to belong to the barbarous race with
which he lived. One of his father’s ministers discovered him, revealed to him
what he was, anti the misconception of his character was removed, and he knew
himself to be a prince. So soul," continued the Hindoo philosopher, "from the
circumstance from which it is placed, mistakes its own character, until the
truth is revealed to it by some holy teacher, and then it knows itself to be
Brahme." We think that that is which appears to be. If a man
should give us an account of the realities he beheld, we should not recognize
the place in his description. Look at the meeting house, or a court-house, or a
jail, or a shop; or a dwelling-house and say what that thing really is before a
true gaze, and they would all go to pieces in our account of them. Men esteem
truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the furthest star, before
Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and
sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and
here. God himself culminate in the present moment, and will
never be more divine in the lapse of all ages. And we are enabled to apprehend
at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetually instilling and
drenching of the reality that surrounds us. The universe constantly and
obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track
is laid for us. Let’s spend our lives in conceiving them. The poet or the artist
never yet had so fair and noble a design some of his posterity at least could
accomplish it. (495) The passage implies that human beings ______.
A.believe in fairy tales B.are immoral if they are lazy C.should be bold and fearless D.cannot distinguish the true from the untrue