皆さん，こんにちは。
青藍塾代表の澁谷です。
今日は，650語ほどの長さがある，レベルの高いある文章を紹介します。
タイトルにもある通り，もしこの文章を読解する能力があれば，たとえ京都大学のような英語の入試問題のレベルが非常に高い大学にも合格できるのではないかと，個人的には思っています。
その文章というのが，以下のものです。
(ちなみに，metaphysics というのは「形而上学」や「抽象的論議」と訳されるもので，広辞苑では「現象を超越し，その背後に在るものの真の本質，存在の根本原理，存在そのものを純粋思惟により或いは直観によって探究しようとする学問。神・世界・霊魂などがその主要問題」と説明されています)
Physics and Metaphysics
There is in our time a widening gulf between the scientific specialist and the ordinary intelligent man. This was very much less the case in former times. In the eighteenth century everybody of intellectual pretensions, at least in France, was more or less acquainted with Newton, who had the same kind of vogue that Freud has in our day. In the nineteenth century the most sensational piece of science was Darwinian evolution, which was easily intelligible to any educated man. But during the present century the things of most importance in science have occurred in physics, and have involved for their understanding exceedingly difficult and abstruse mathematical reasoning. So abstruse and difficult has this reasoning becomes that even distinguished physicists have had to stand aside. The general reader knows that odd things have been discovered about relativity and about atoms, but he is aware that whatever attempts he may have made to find out what it is all about have not met with as much success as he might have hoped. Now all this would not have mattered if the new physics had had for its content merely specialized advances in the later parts of a very well developed science. If that had been the case, the matter could have been left to the experts, and the general public would have confined itself to benevolent neutrality.
The new theories in physics, however, are not only new in mathematical technique or in the results at which they arrive; they are new also in their general point of view, in the character of their reasoning, and in the metaphysic which inspires their hypotheses. This aspect of their work is only accidentally involved in mathematical technicalities, and can with a little trouble be so presented that intelligent laymen, at any rate the younger of them, can understand it and appreciate its importance. There is of course, as in any rapidly growing subject, still controversy and uncertainty, but both sides in a controversy of physicists are advocating theories alien to educated common sense, and the theories of both sides have something in common which distinguishes them from the theories of former times.
Applied physics, that is to say, everything that is used as yet in industry, and even in such modern developments as radio, still uses older conceptions which are on the whole consonant with educated common sense. The newer physics as yet has not become embodied in anything commercially useful. There is no reason to suppose that this state of affairs will continue. The theory upon which radio depends existed for many years before it received practical application. I am not, however, concerned in this article with the impossible attempt to forecast the inventions which may hereafter utilize the modern developments of physics. What I want to do is to suggest the changes in popular metaphysics which must come about, if the new physics is to produce the same kind of influence upon our outlook that was produced in the eighteenth century by Newton, and in the nineteenth by Darwin.
I think that if we were to search for one short phrase to characterize the difference between the newer physics and that of past times, I should choose the following: The world is not composed of “things”. To the metaphysician this is no new idea, but in the past the metaphysician could not point to the technique of science as being on his side, and he was therefore unable to combat the popular metaphysics which survived contentedly alongside of his speculations. Nowadays, physicists, the most hard-headed of mankind, the people associated more than any others with the intellectual and mechanical triumphs that distinguish our epoch, have embodied in their technique this insubstantiality which some of the metaphysicians have so long urged in vain. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on” was once a piece of poetic imagination; now it is among the presuppositions of physics.
いかがでしょうか？
高校生であれば，辞書を使いながら３回繰り返して読んで，その内容が9割以上理解できれば，どんな大学の入試英語にも楽に対応できると思います。
ちなみにこの文章は，イギリスが生んだ超人 Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)が1928年(今から100年近くも前！)に発表した Physics and Metaphysics というエッセイの冒頭４段落です。
「形而上学」という，少し高校生にとっては難しいテーマですが，文系理系を問わず，京大や東大を目指すのであれば，知っておかなければならない分野でしょう。
さすが論理学者としても知られるラッセルの書く文章だけあって，論理構成がきちっとしている上に，倒置構文(So abstruse and difficult has this reasoning becomes ...)や関係詞(The theory upon which radio depends existed ...)，to不定詞(if the new physics is to produce the same kind of influence)など，受験生にとっても必須の重要文法単元が多く使われていて，高校生には非常に勉強になるオススメの文章です。
難関国立大や早慶を目指すのであれば，高校3年生の受験期までにこの文章を楽々と読みこなせるようなレベルに到達できるよう，今のうちから逆算して英語の勉強を進めていくようにするとよいでしょう。
参考までに，どのくらいこの文章を理解できているのかを確認するために，問題を一つ出しておきます。
最終段落にある，
he was therefore unable to combat the popular metaphysics which survived contentedly alongside of his speculations
という一節の，the popular metaphysics は具体的に何を指しているでしょうか？
これを説明することができれば，おおよそこの文章の内容を理解できている能力は有しているということができるでしょう。
答えが気になる人はコメントから質問をお待ちしております。
ぜひ今後の英語の学習にお役立てください。
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