Day 194 MCAT Practice Question

Passage 2

Among the Greeks and Romans of the classical age philosophy occupied the place

taken by religion among ourselves. Their appeal was to reason not to revelation.

To what, asks Cicero in his Offices, are we to look for training in virtue, if not to

philosophy? Now, if truth is believed to rest upon authority it is natural that it should

be impressed upon the mind from the earliest age, since the essential thing is that

it should be believed, but a truth which makes its appeal to reason must be content

to wait till reason is developed. We are born into the Eastern, Western or Anglican

communion or some other denomination, but it was of his own free choice that the

serious minded young Greek or Roman embraced the tenets of one of the great

sects which divided the world of philosophy…Conversions from one sect to another

were of quite rare occurrence…When a young man joined a school, he committed

himself to all its opinions, not only as to the end of life, which was the main point of

division, but as to all questions on all subjects. The Stoic did not differ merely in his

ethics from the Epicurean; he differed also in his theology and his physics and his

metaphysics…The language which Cicero sometimes uses about the seriousness of

the choice made in early life and how a young man gets entrammelled by a school

before he is really able to judge, reminds us of what we hear said nowadays about

the danger of a young man’s taking orders before his opinions are formed. To this

it was replied that a young man only exercised the right of private judgment in

selecting the authority whom he should follow, and, having once done that, trusted

to him for all the rest…

An intense practicality was a mark of the later Greek philosophy. This was common

to Stoicism with its rival Epicureanism. Both regarded philosophy as ‘the art of life,’

though they differed in their conception of what that art should be. Widely as the

two schools were opposed to one another, they had also other features in common.

Both were children of an age in which the free city had given way to monarchies,

and personal had taken the place of corporate life. The question of happiness

is no longer, as with Aristotle, and still more with Plato, one for the state, but for

the individual. In both schools the speculative interest was feeble from the first,

and tended to become feebler as time went on. Both were new departures from

pre-existent schools. Stoicism was bred out of Cynicism, as Epicureanism out of

Cyrenaicism. Both were content to fall back for their physics upon the pre-Socratic

schools, the one adopting the firm philosophy of Heraclitus, the other the atomic

theory of Democritus. Both were in strong reaction against the abstractions of Plato

and Aristotle, and would tolerate nothing but concrete reality. The Stoics were quite

as materialistic in their own way as the Epicureans. With regard indeed to the nature

of the highest god we may, with Senaca represent[ing] the difference between

the two schools as a question of the senses against the intellect, but we shall see

presently that the Stoics regarded the intellect itself as being a kind of body…

It was assumed by the Greeks that the ways of nature were ‘the ways of

pleasantness,’ and that ‘all her paths’ were ‘peace.’ This may seem to us a startling

assumption, but that is because we do not mean by ‘nature’ the same thing as they

did. We connect the term with the origin of a thing, they connected it rather with

the end; by the ‘natural state’ we mean a state of savagery, they meant the highest

civilization; we mean by a thing’s nature what it is or has been, they meant what it

ought to become under the most favourable conditions; not the sour crab, but the

mellow glory of the Hesperides worthy to be guarded by a sleepless dragon, was

to the Greeks the natural apple. Another definition of [the Greeks] puts the matter

still more clearly. ‘What each thing is when its growth has been completed, that we

declare to be the nature of each thing.’

Following…this conception the Stoics identified a life in accordance with nature with

a life in accordance with the highest perfection to which man could attain. Now,

as man was essentially a rational animal, his work as man lay in living the rational

life. And the perfection of reason was virtue. Hence the ways of nature were no

other than the ways of virtue. And so it came about that the Stoic formula might be

expressed in a number of different ways which yet all amounted to the same thing.

The end was to live the virtuous life, or to live consistently, or to live in accordance

with nature, or to live rationally.

Stock, S. G. W. J. (2005). A guide to Stoicism. Project Gutenberg. (Original work

published 1911)

What of these are specific character traits that later Greek philosophers had?

A) Realistic

B) Embellishing

C) Ornate

D) Always Honest