【61】The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind; it

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问题      【61】The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind; it is simply the mode by which all phenomena are reasoned about and given precise and exact explanation. There is no more difference, but there is just the same kind of difference, between the mental operations of a man of science and those of an ordinary person, as there is between the operations and methods of a baker or of a butcher weighing out his goods in common scales, and the operations of a chemist in performing a difficult and complex analysis by means of his balance and finely graded weights. 【62】 It is not that scales in the one ease, and the balance in the other, differ in the principles of their con struction or manner of working; but that the latter is a much finer apparatus and of course much more accurate in its measurement than the former.
     You will understand this better, perhaps, if I give you some familiar examples. 【63】You have all heard it repeated that men of science work by means of induction and deduction, that by the help of these operations, they, in a sort of sense, manage to extract from Nature certain natural laws  and that out of these, by some special skill of their own, they build up their theories. 【64】And it is imagined by many that the operations of the common mind can be by no means compared with these processes, and that they have to be acquired by a sort of special training. To hear all these large words, you would think that the mind of a man of science must be constituted differently from that of his fellow men; but if you will not be frightened by terms, you will discover that you are quite wrong, and that all these terrible apparatus ate being used by yourselves every day and every hour of your lives.
     There is a well-known incident in one of Moliere’s plays, where the author makes the hero express unbounded delight on being told that he had been talking prose during the whole of his life. In the same way, I trust that you will take comfort, and be delighted with yourselves, on the discovery that you have been acting on the principles of inductive and deductive philosophy during the same period. 【65】 Probably there is not one here who has not in the course of the day had occasion to set in motion a complex train of reasoning, of the very same kind, though differing in degree, as that which a scientific man goes through in tracing the causes of natural phenomena.
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答案在座的诸位中,大概不会有人一整天都没有机会进行一连串复杂的思考活动,这些思考活动与科学家在探索自然现象原因时所经历的思考活动,尽管复杂程度不同,但本质上却是完全相同的。

解析 本句主干是there be句型。运用“融合法”,把定语从句与主句融合译为一个句子。of the very same kind汉译时,应增译为完整的汉语句子。关系代词 which指代的是a complex train of reasoning,汉译时为避免重复,用减译法简单地译为:“这些思考活动”。in the course of在……期间,in degree意为“在程度上”,此处引申为“在复杂性的程度上”
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