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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: the animal and vegetable world, are put into the refiner's fire, and the
dross and other elements which adhere to them are purged away. But the
contemporary of Plato and Socrates was incapable of resisting the power of
any analogy which occurred to him, and was drawn into any consequences
which seemed to follow. He had no methods of difference or of concomitant
variations, by the use of which he could distinguish the accidental from
the essential. He could not isolate phenomena, and he was helpless against
the influence of any word which had an equivocal or double sense.
Yet without this crude use of analogy the ancient physical philosopher
would have stood still; he could not have made even 'one guess among many'
without comparison. The course of natural phenomena would have passed
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