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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: of love which pervades them both. There are loves and strifes of the body
as well as of the mind. Like Hippocrates the Asclepiad, he is a disciple
of Heracleitus, whose conception of the harmony of opposites he explains in
a new way as the harmony after discord; to his common sense, as to that of
many moderns as well as ancients, the identity of contradictories is an
absurdity. His notion of love may be summed up as the harmony of man with
himself in soul as well as body, and of all things in heaven and earth with
one another.
Aristophanes is ready to laugh and make laugh before he opens his mouth,
just as Socrates, true to his character, is ready to argue before he begins
to speak. He expresses the very genius of the old comedy, its coarse and
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