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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Euthydemus by Plato: together words or ideas, how to escape ambiguities in the meaning of terms
or in the structure of propositions, how to resist the fixed impression of
an 'eternal being' or 'perpetual flux,' how to distinguish between words
and things--these were problems not easy of solution in the infancy of
philosophy. They presented the same kind of difficulty to the half-
educated man which spelling or arithmetic do to the mind of a child. It
was long before the new world of ideas which had been sought after with
such passionate yearning was set in order and made ready for use. To us
the fallacies which arise in the pre-Socratic philosophy are trivial and
obsolete because we are no longer liable to fall into the errors which are
expressed by them. The intellectual world has become better assured to us,
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