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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: saw in the prodigy of the one-horned ram the omen of the supreme
rule of Pericles, and when Anaxagoras showed that the abnormal
development was the rational resultant of the peculiar formation of
the skull, the dreamer and the man of science were both right; it
was the business of the latter to consider how the prodigy came
about, of the former to show why it was so formed and what it so
portended. The progression of thought is exemplified in all
particulars. Herodotus had a glimmering sense of the impossibility
of a violation of nature. Thucydides ignored the supernatural.
Polybius rationalised it. Plutarch raises it to its mystical
heights again, though he bases it on law. In a word, Plutarch felt
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