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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Protagoras by Plato: Protagoras; in all of them the doctrine that virtue is pleasure, or that
pleasure is the chief or only good, is distinctly renounced.
Thus after many preparations and oppositions, both of the characters of men
and aspects of the truth, especially of the popular and philosophical
aspect; and after many interruptions and detentions by the way, which, as
Theodorus says in the Theaetetus, are quite as agreeable as the argument,
we arrive at the great Socratic thesis that virtue is knowledge. This is
an aspect of the truth which was lost almost as soon as it was found; and
yet has to be recovered by every one for himself who would pass the limits
of proverbial and popular philosophy. The moral and intellectual are
always dividing, yet they must be reunited, and in the highest conception
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