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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: One of the company here remarked that this was inconsistent with the old
assertion that opposites generated opposites. But that, replies Socrates,
was affirmed, not of opposite ideas either in us or in nature, but of
opposition in the concrete--not of life and death, but of individuals
living and dying. When this objection has been removed, Socrates proceeds:
This doctrine of the mutual exclusion of opposites is not only true of the
opposites themselves, but of things which are inseparable from them. For
example, cold and heat are opposed; and fire, which is inseparable from
heat, cannot co-exist with cold, or snow, which is inseparable from cold,
with heat. Again, the number three excludes the number four, because three
is an odd number and four is an even number, and the odd is opposed to the
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