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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: Words and thought were to him a field for careful and reverent
induction, as the phenomena of nature are to us the disciples of Bacon.
But with these hapless Megarans, who thought that they had found that
for which Socrates professed only to seek dimly and afar off, and had
got it safe in a dogma, preserved as it were in spirits, and put by in a
museum, the great use of dialectic was to confute opponents. Delight in
their own subtlety grew on them, the worship not of objective truth, but
of the forms of the intellect whereby it may be demonstrated; till they
became the veriest word-splitters, rivals of the old sophists whom their
master had attacked, and justified too often Aristophanes' calumny,
which confounded Socrates with his opponents, as a man whose aim was to
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