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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: generally called 'knowing' rather than 'learning,' but the word 'learning'
is also used; and you did not see, as they explained to you, that the term
is employed of two opposite sorts of men, of those who know, and of those
who do not know. There was a similar trick in the second question, when
they asked you whether men learn what they know or what they do not know.
These parts of learning are not serious, and therefore I say that the
gentlemen are not serious, but are only playing with you. For if a man had
all that sort of knowledge that ever was, he would not be at all the wiser;
he would only be able to play with men, tripping them up and oversetting
them with distinctions of words. He would be like a person who pulls away
a stool from some one when he is about to sit down, and then laughs and
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