No doubt the age in which Seneca lived afforded ample occasion for such effusions, but his predecessors must have found similar occasions in their own days. Indeed, all the principles of the Stoic School, when consistently developed, made it impossible to consider the great majority of men as anything else than a mass of fools and sinners. From this sweeping verdict, even the most distinguished names were not excluded. If asked for examples of wisdom, they would point to Socrates, Diogenes, Antisthenes, [691] and, in later times, to Cato; [692] but not only would they deny philosophic virtue, as Plato had done before them, to the greatest statesmen and heroes of early times, but they would deny to them all and every kind of virtue. [693] Even the admission that general faults belong to some in a lower degree than to others can hardly be reconciled with their principle of the equality of all who are not wise. [694] [(3) Conversion.] The two moral states being thus at opposite poles, a gradual transition from one to the other is, of course, out of the question. There may be a progress from folly and wickedness in the direction of wisdom, [695] but the actual passage from one to the other must be momentary and instantaneous. [696] Those who are still progressing belong, without exception, to the class of the foolish; [697] and one who has lately become wise is in the first moment unconscious of his new state. [698] The transition takes place so rapidly, and his former state affords so few points of contact with the one on which he has newly entered, that the mind does not keep pace with the change, and only becomes conscious of it by subsequent experience.