单选题 The process by means of which human beings arbitrarily make certain things stand for other things may be called the symbolic process.
Everywhere we turn, we see the symbolic process at work. There are 1 things men do or want to do, possess or want to possess, that have not a symbolic value.
Almost all fashionable clothes are 2 symbolic, so is food. We 3 our furniture to serve 4 visible symbols of our taste, wealth, and social position. We often choose our houses on the basis of a feeling that it "looks well" to have a "good address." We trade perfectly good cars in for 5 models not always to get better transportation, but to give evidence to the community that we can 6 it.
Such complicated and apparently 7 behavior leads philosophers to ask over and over again, "why can"t human beings live simply and naturally." Often the complexity of human life makes us look enviously at the relative 8 of such live as dogs and cats. Simply, the fact that symbolic process makes complexity possible is no reason for wanting to 9 to a cat and to a eat-and-dog existence. A better solution is to understand the symbolic process so that instead of being its slaves we become, to some degree at least, its 10 .