201. In the mechanical and then the Industrial Age, it was easy to see people as mechanisms and the science of human understanding as something akin to engineering or physics.
be akin to 类似于
202. This mode of thought is reductionist; it breaks problems into discrete parts and is blind to emergent systems.
203. It highly values conscious cognition - what you might call level 2 cognition - which it can see, qualify, formalize, and understand. But it is blind to the influence of unconscious - what you might call level 1 cognition - which is cloudlike, nonlinear, hard to see, and impossible to formalize.
formalize 形式化
204. The French Enlightenment was led by thinkers like Descartes [deˈkɑrt], Rousseau [ruˈso], and Voltaire. These were philosophers who confronted a world of superstition and feudalism and sought to expose it to the clarifying light of reason. Inspired by the scientific revolution, they had great faith in the power of individual reason to detect error and logically arrive at universal truth.
205. Leaders of the British Enlightenment acknowledged the importance of reason. They were not irrationalists. But they believed that individual reason is limited and of secondary importance.
206. Whereas the leaders of the French Enlightenment spoke the language of logic, science and universal rules, the leaders of British Enlightenment emphasized the power of sentiments and the affections.
207. British Enlightenment stressed that people are born with a social sense, which plays out beneath the level of awareness. They are guided by a desire to be admired and to be worthy of admiration. Morality flows from these semiconscious sentiments, not from logical deductions derived from abstract laws.
play out 逐渐发生; 展开
208. It's often a mistake to dissect a problem into discrete parts because the truth is found in the nature of the connections between the things you are studying.
209. Thinkers from the French Enlightenment imagined that we are Rational Animals, distinguished from other animals by our power of logic. But the thinkers from the British Enlightenment were right to depict us as Social Animals.
depict 描述; 描绘，描画
210. Then there is the problem of stereotypes. The unconscious mind finds patterns. It even finds them where none exist and makes all sorts of vague generalizations.
211. In the first place, conscious processes are nestled upon the unconscious ones. It is nonsensical to talk about rational thought without unconscious thought because level 2 receives its input and its goals and its directional signals from level 1.
nonsensical [nɑ:nˈsensɪkl] 无意义的，荒谬的
212. Level 1 has much higher processing capacity. Measured at its highest potential, the conscious mind still has a processing capacity 200,000 times weaker than the unconscious.
213. The two systems have to intertwine if a person is going to thrive. Level 1 has vast implicit memory systems it can draw upon, whereas Level 2 relies heavily upon the working memory system, the bits of information that are consciously in mind at any given moment.
214. Then there is perception. As it absorbs data the unconscious simultaneously interprets, organizes and creates a preliminary understanding. It puts every discrete piece of information in context.
215. The general rule is that conscious processes are better at solving problems with a few variables or choices, but unconscious processes are better at solving problems with many possibilities and variables. Conscious processes are better at solving problems when the factors are concretely defined. Unconscious processes are better when everything is ambiguous.
216. Level 1 produces more creative links and unlikely parallels. Unconscious thought can take in many more factors.
217. Intuition and logic exist in partnership. The challenge is to organize this partnership, knowing when to rely on Level 1 and when to rely on Level 2, and how to organize the interchange between the two.
218. No event can be understood in isolation from its place in the historical flow - the infinity of prior events, minute causes, and circumstances that touch it in visible and invisible ways.