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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: him the errors into which he has fallen through his own fault, or that of
the company which he has previously kept. If you do so, your adversary
will lay the blame of his own confusion and perplexity on himself, and not
on you. He will follow and love you, and will hate himself, and escape
from himself into philosophy, in order that he may become different from
what he was. But the other mode of arguing, which is practised by the
many, will have just the opposite effect upon him; and as he grows older,
instead of turning philosopher, he will come to hate philosophy. I would
recommend you, therefore, as I said before, not to encourage yourself in
this polemical and controversial temper, but to find out, in a friendly and
congenial spirit, what we really mean when we say that all things are in
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