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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: their hands, and in the Sophist as incapable of argument. They are
probably the same who are said in the Tenth Book of the Laws to attribute
the course of events to nature, art, and chance. Who they were, we have no
means of determining except from Plato's description of them. His silence
respecting the Atomists might lead us to suppose that here we have a trace
of them. But the Atomists were not Materialists in the grosser sense of
the term, nor were they incapable of reasoning; and Plato would hardly have
described a great genius like Democritus in the disdainful terms which he
uses of the Materialists. Upon the whole, we must infer that the persons
here spoken of are unknown to us, like the many other writers and talkers
at Athens and elsewhere, of whose endless activity of mind Aristotle in his
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