PSAT Reading Practice Test 44: Great Global Conversation: Emerson and Arnold

Questions 1-10 refer to the following information.

The first passage is adapted from Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Nature," a foundational text of transcendentalism. Matthew Arnold, inspired by Emerson, wrote Literature and Science, which is adapted for the second passage.

passage 1
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histo-
ries, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through
their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not
we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation
05to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life
stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned
to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living
generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There are
new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.
10Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the
perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has
awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution
in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as
truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design.
15Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to
what end is nature?
All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have theories of races and
of functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to an idea of creation. We are now so far from
the road to truth, that religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and speculative men
20are esteemed unsound and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the
most practical. Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence.
passage 2
Practical people talk with a smile of Plato and of his absolute ideas; and it is impossible
to deny that Plato's ideas do often seem unpractical and impracticable, and especially when
one views them in connexion with the life of a great work-a-day world like the United States.
25The necessary staple of the life of such a world Plato regards with disdain; handicraft and
trade and the working professions he regards with disdain; but what becomes of the life of an
industrial modern community if you take handicraft and trade and the working professions
out of it? The base mechanic arts and handicrafts, says Plato, bring about a natural weakness
in the principle of excellence in a man, so that he cannot govern the ignoble growths in him,
30but nurses them, and cannot understand fostering any other. Those who exercise such arts
and trades, as they have their bodies, he says, marred by their vulgar businesses, so they have
their souls, too, bowed and broken by them.
Nor do the working professions fare any better than trade at the hands of Plato. He draws
for us an inimitable picture of the working lawyer, and of his life of bondage; he shows how this
35bondage from his youth up has stunted and warped him, and made him small and crooked
of soul, encompassing him with difficulties which he is not man enough to rely on justice and
truth as means to encounter, but has recourse, for help out of them, to falsehood and wrong.
And so, says Plato, this poor creature is bent and broken, and grows up from boy to man without
a particle of soundness in him, although exceedingly smart and clever in his own esteem.
40One cannot refuse to admire the artist who draws these pictures. But we say to ourselves
that his ideas show the influence of a primitive and obsolete order of things, when the warrior
caste and the priestly caste were alone in honour, and the humble work of the world was done
by slaves. We have now changed all that; the modern majority consists in work, as Emerson
declares; and in work, we may add, principally of such plain and dusty kind as the work of
45cultivators of the ground, handicraftsmen, men of trade and business, men of the working
professions.