SECTION III

Time-35 minutes

27 Questions

Directions: Each passage in this section is followed by a group of questions to be answered on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage. For some of the questions, more than one of the choices could conceivably answer the question. However, you are to choose the best answer, that is, the response that most accurately and completely answers the question, and blacken the corresponding space on your answer sheet.

Nearly every writer on the philosophy of civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., makes a connection between King and Henry David Thoreau, usually via Thoreau's famous essay, "Civil Disobedience" (1849). In his book Stride Toward Freedom (1958), King himself stated that Thoreau's essay was his first intellectual contact with the theory of passive resistance to governmental laws that are perceived as morally unjust. However, this emphasis on Thoreau's influence on King is unfortunate: first. King would not have agreed with many other aspects of Thoreau's philosophy, including Thoreau's ultimate acceptance of violence as a form of protest; second, an overemphasis on the influence of one essay has kept historians from noting other correspondences between King's philosophy and transcendentalism. "Civil Disobedience" was the only example of transcendentalist writing with which King was familiar, and in many other transcendentalist writings. including works by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, King would have found ideas more nearly akin to his own.

The kind of civil disobedience King had in mind was, in fact. quite different from Thoreau's view of civil disobedience. Thoreau, like most other transcendentalists, was primarily interested in reform of the individual, whereas King was primarily interested in reform of society. As a protest against the Mexican War, Thoreau refused to pay taxes, but he did not hope by his action to force a change in national policy. While he encouraged others to adopt similar protests, he did not attempt to mount any mass protest action against unjust laws. In contrast to Thoreau, King began to advocate the use of mass civil disobedience to effect revolutionary changes within the social system.

However, King's writings suggest that, without realizing it, he was an incipient transcendentalist. Most transcendentalists subscribed to the concept of "higher law" and included civil disobedience to unjust laws as part of their strategy. They often invoked the concept of higher law to justify their opposition to slavery and to advocate disobedience to the strengthened Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. In his second major book, King's discussion of just and unjust laws and the responsibility of the individual is very similar to the transcendentalists' discussion of higher law In reference to how one can advocate breaking some laws and obeying others, King notes that there are two types of laws, just and unjust; he describes a just law as a "code that squares with the moral law" and an unjust law as a "code that is out of harmony with the moral law." Thus. King's opposition to the injustice of legalized segregation in the twentieth century is philosophically akin to the transcendentalists' opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law in the nineteenth century.

1.Which one of the following best states the main idea of the passage?

(A) King's philosophy was more influenced by Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience than by any other writing of the transcendentalists.

(B) While historians may have overestimated Thoreau's influence on King, King was greatly influenced by a number of the transcendentalist philosophers.

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