The persistent and universal belief in an afterlife is a very odd phenomenon. It is __(27)__ the rationalpart of the brain makes man unique in his awareness that the one inevitable event in his life is death,while at a deeper level of consciousness the more intuitive part of the brain cannot reconcile itself tothe fact of the inescapable extinction of oneself and those to whom one is attached. The individualtherefore postulates the existence of the __(28)__, as an entity which will live on after his physical decay.It almost looks as if for half a million years the two parts of the brain __(29)__ irreconcilably at war witheach other, each refusing to accept the conclusions of the other. As Erwin Panofsky pointed out,“There is __(30)__ any sphere of human experience where rationally incompatible beliefs so easily coexist,and where pre-logical, one might almost say metalogical feelings so stubbornly survive in periods ofadvanced civilization as in our attitudes towards the dead.” A final twist to the __(31)__ is that the conceptof rationality developed in the West in the eighteenth century concurrently with the concept ofindividualism. __(32)__, the probability of personal extinction became at the same time more logicallycompelling and more emotionally unacceptable. The intellectual and psychological tension hasactually intensified in the last 200 years.
【題組】27.
(A) similarly
(B) secularly
(C) as if
(D) no matter