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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: representative of all that Plato most disliked in the moral and
intellectual tendencies of his own age; the adversary of the almost equally
ideal Socrates. He seems to be always growing in the fancy of Plato, now
boastful, now eristic, now clothing himself in rags of philosophy, now more
akin to the rhetorician or lawyer, now haranguing, now questioning, until
the final appearance in the Politicus of his departing shadow in the
disguise of a statesman. We are not to suppose that Plato intended by such
a description to depict Protagoras or Gorgias, or even Thrasymachus, who
all turn out to be 'very good sort of people when we know them,' and all of
them part on good terms with Socrates. But he is speaking of a being as
imaginary as the wise man of the Stoics, and whose character varies in
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