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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: sense, of the great complexity of the causes and the great simplicity of
the effect.
The sympathy of the mind and the ear is no less striking than the sympathy
of the mind and the eye. Do we not seem to perceive instinctively and as
an act of sense the differences of articulate speech and of musical notes?
Yet how small a part of speech or of music is produced by the impression of
the ear compared with that which is furnished by the mind!
Again: the more refined faculty of sense, as in animals so also in man,
seems often to be transmitted by inheritance. Neither must we forget that
in the use of the senses, as in his whole nature, man is a social being,
who is always being educated by language, habit, and the teaching of other
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