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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: with them; the great libraries stimulated the demand for them; and at a
time when there was no regular publication of books, they easily crept into
the world.
(b) When one epistle out of a number is spurious, the remainder of the
series cannot be admitted to be genuine, unless there be some independent
ground for thinking them so: when all but one are spurious, overwhelming
evidence is required of the genuineness of the one: when they are all
similar in style or motive, like witnesses who agree in the same tale, they
stand or fall together. But no one, not even Mr. Grote, would maintain
that all the Epistles of Plato are genuine, and very few critics think that
more than one of them is so. And they are clearly all written from the
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