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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: composed shorter writings after longer ones, than suppose that he lost hold
of further points of view which he had once attained.
It is more easy to find traces of the Pythagoreans, Eleatics, Megarians,
Cynics, Cyrenaics and of the ideas of Anaxagoras, in the Philebus, than to
say how much is due to each of them. Had we fuller records of those old
philosophers, we should probably find Plato in the midst of the fray
attempting to combine Eleatic and Pythagorean doctrines, and seeking to
find a truth beyond either Being or number; setting up his own concrete
conception of good against the abstract practical good of the Cynics, or
the abstract intellectual good of the Megarians, and his own idea of
classification against the denial of plurality in unity which is also
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