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  3. The most surprising aspect of the modern man’s good conscience is that he asserts and justifies it in terms of the most varied a

The most surprising aspect of the modern man’s good conscience is that he asserts and justifies it in terms of the most varied a

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问题     The most surprising aspect of the modern man’s good conscience is that he asserts and justifies it in terms of the most varied and even contradictory metaphysical theories and social philosophies. The idealist Hegel and the materialist Marx agree in their fundamental confidence in human virtue, disagreeing only in their conception of the period and the social circumstances in which and the method by which his essential goodness is, or is to be, realized. The romantic naturalist Rousseau agrees with the rationalistic naturalists of the French Enlightenment, though in the one case the seat of virtue is found in natural impulse unspoiled by rational disciplines and in the other case it is reason which guarantees virtue. Among the rationalistic naturalists again there is agreement upon this point whether they are hedonistic or Stoic in their conceptions and whether they believe that reason discovers and leads to a natural harmony of egoistic impulses or that it discovers and affirms a natural harmony of social impulses.
    The whole Christian drama of salvation is rejected ostensibly because of the incredible character of the myths of Creation, Fall, Atonement, etc., in which it is expressed. But the typical modern is actually more certain of the complete irrelevance of these doctrines than of their incredibility. He is naturally not inclined to take dubious religious myths seriously, since he finds no relation between the ethos which informs them and his own sense of security and complacency. The sense of guilt expressed in them is to him a mere vestigial remnant of primitive fears of higher powers, of which he is happily emancipated. The sense of sin is, in the phrase of a particularly vapid modern social scientist, "a psychopathic aspect of adolescent mentality".
    The universality of this easy conscience among moderns is the more surprising since it continues to express itself almost as unqualifiedly in a period of social decay as in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century heyday of a bourgeois culture. The modern man is involved in social chaos and political anarchy. The Marxist escape from this chaos has developed in Russia into a regime of unparalleled proportions. Contemporary history is filled with manifestations of man’s hysteria and furies; with evidences of his demonic capacity and inclination to break the harmonies of nature and defy the prudent canons of rational restraint. Yet no cumulation of contradictory evidence seems to disturb modern man’s good opinion of himself. He considers himself the victim of corrupting institutions which he is about to destroy or reconstruct, or of the confusions of ignorance which an adequate education is about to overcome. Yet he continues to regard himself as essentially harmless and virtuous. The question therefore arises how modern man arrived at, and by what means he maintains, an estimate of his virtue in such pathetic contradiction with the obvious facts of his history.
What is the thesis concerning the dilemma of social conscience?
选项 A、Corruption parallels modern development.
B、Modem history will move to a fair state and virtue will follow.
C、How to qualify virtue within the context of social decline and bourgeois culture.
D、Contradictions of virtue and ethos will fade in time.
答案C
解析 本题的四个选项中，只有C项为正确答案。这可从文中最后一段的内容推知。
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