Multiple choice

What message does the author seek to convey?

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question.
But though it was Herbert Spencer who invested these arguments with their most systematic form, and gave them their definite place in the theory of evolution as a whole, they were widely diffused already among his immediate predecessors, as we may see by the following passage taken from an unlikely quarter. "It is," says Macaulay, in his Essay on Dryden, anticipating the exact phraseology of Spencer, "the age that makes the man, not the man that makes the age.... The inequalities of the intellect, like the inequalities of the surface of the globe, bear so small a proportion to the mass, that in calculating its great revolutions they may safely be neglected." And Macaulay is merely expressing a doctrine distinctive of his time — a doctrine which, to take one further example, dominated in a notable way the entire thought of Buckle. This doctrine, which, to a greater or less degree, merges the organism in its environment, or the individual, however great, in society, has been seized on by the more recent socialists just as the theory of Ricardo, with regard to labor and value, was seized on by Karl Marx, and has been adapted by them to their own purposes.

  1. Earth mass is barely affected by the irregularities on its surface.

  2. The micro gets absorbed into the macro and becomes macro.

  3. Men with greater intellect go unrecognized in a mass of ordinariness.

  4. It is the circumstances of an era that propel a man to greatness.

  5. The evolution of intellect is so gradual as to be almost imperceptible.
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D Correct answer
Explanation

Correct. The author is trying to collate the viewpoints of many thinkers who contend that it is the age that makes the man, not the other way round. The option also states that circumstances create the man, not the other way round.

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