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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: them, 'if both visible and invisible qualities exist, what is the common
nature which is attributed to them by the term "being" or "existence"?'
And, as they are incapable of answering this question, we may as well reply
for them, that being is the power of doing or suffering. Then we turn to
the friends of ideas: to them we say, 'You distinguish becoming from
being?' 'Yes,' they will reply. 'And in becoming you participate through
the bodily senses, and in being, by thought and the mind?' 'Yes.' And you
mean by the word 'participation' a power of doing or suffering? To this
they answer--I am acquainted with them, Theaetetus, and know their ways
better than you do--that being can neither do nor suffer, though becoming
may. And we rejoin: Does not the soul know? And is not 'being' known?
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