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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Eryxias by Platonic Imitator: SOCRATES: It is not therefore necessary that the means by which we obtain
what is useful for a certain object should always be useful for the same
object: for it seems that bad actions may sometimes serve good purposes?
The matter will be still plainer if we look at it in this way:--If things
are useful towards the several ends for which they exist, which ends would
not come into existence without them, how would you regard them? Can
ignorance, for instance, be useful for knowledge, or disease for health, or
vice for virtue?
CRITIAS: Never.
SOCRATES: And yet we have already agreed--have we not?--that there can be
no knowledge where there has not previously been ignorance, nor health
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