自考综合英语2-15.doc

Lesson Fifteen Edison: Inventor of Invention Walter Lippmann 　　提起大发明家爱迪生，人们首先想到的是他所发明的那些奇妙之物——从电灯到留声机，哪一样不是他智慧的结晶。但是人们往往忽略了他对人类进步的最大贡献——他使人们认识到在人们的世界观形成的过程中科学是多么重要，他确立了科学研究在社会中的地位。 　　 1 It is impossible to measure the importance of Edison by adding up the specific inventions with which his name is associated. Far-reaching as many of them have been in their effect upon modern civilization, the total effect of Edisons career surpasses the sum of all of them. He did not merely make the incandescent lamp and the phonograph and innumerable other devices practicable for general use; it was given to him to demonstrate the power of applied science so concretely, so understandably, so convincingly that he altered the mentality of mankind. In his lifetime, largely because of his successes, there came into widest acceptance the revolutionary conception that man could by the use of his intelligence invent a new mode of living on this planet; the human spirit, which in all previous ages had regarded the conditions of life as essentially unchanging and beyond mans control, confidently, and perhaps somewhat naively, adopted the conviction that anything could be changed and everything could be controlled. 　　 2 This idea of progress is in the scale of history a very new idea. It seems first to have taken possession of a few minds in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as an accompaniment of the great advances in pure science. It gained greater currency in the first half of the nineteenth century when industrial civilization began to be transformed by the application of steam power. But these changes, impressive as they were, created so much human misery by the crude and cruel manner in which they were exploited that all through the century men instinctively feared and opposed the progress of machines, and of the sciences on which they rested. It was only at the end of the century, with the perfecting of the electric light bulb, the telephone, the phonograph, and the like, t