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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: been added also in the Third Edition remarks on other subjects. A list of
the most important of these additions is given at the end of this Preface.)
Ancient and modern philosophy throw a light upon one another: but they
should be compared, not confounded. Although the connexion between them is
sometimes accidental, it is often real. The same questions are discussed
by them under different conditions of language and civilization; but in
some cases a mere word has survived, while nothing or hardly anything of
the pre-Socratic, Platonic, or Aristotelian meaning is retained. There are
other questions familiar to the moderns, which have no place in ancient
philosophy. The world has grown older in two thousand years, and has
enlarged its stock of ideas and methods of reasoning. Yet the germ of
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