259
Str. What I have spoken of before—the ability to let those quibbles go as of no account and to follow and refute in detail the arguments of a man who says that other is in a sense the same, or that the same is other, and to do this from that point of view and with regard for those relations which he presupposes for either of these conditions. But to show that in some sort of fashion the same is the other, and the other the same, and the great small, and the like unlike, and to take pleasure in thus always bringing forward opposites in the argument,—all that is no true refutation, but is plainly the newborn offspring of some brain that has just begun to lay hold upon the problem of realities.
259
Theaet. Exactly so.
259
Str. For certainly, my friend, the attempt to separate everything from everything else is not only not in good taste but also shows that a man is utterly uncultivated and unphilosophical.
259
Theaet. Why so?
259
Str. The complete separation of each thing from all is the utterly final obliteration of all discourse. For our power of discourse is derived from the interweaving of the classes or ideas with one another. The denial, that is to say, of all the interrelations of ideas leads to purely negative results. Examples of this are the exclusive antithesis of being and not-being and the mutual exclusion of rest and motion. The difficulty is solved at once when we recognize that positive and negative are necessarily interwoven in the nature of things, that the negative has only a relative existence and is not the opposite of the positive, but only different from it.
259
Theaet. True.
260
Str. Observe, then, that we have now been just in time in carrying our point against the supporters of such doctrine, and in forcing them to admit that one thing mingles with another.
260
Theaet. What was our object?
