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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: found them all and regularly divided a particular field of knowledge into
classes, you may leave the further consideration of individuals. But you
must not pass at once either from unity to infinity, or from infinity to
unity. In music, for example, you may begin with the most general notion,
but this alone will not make you a musician: you must know also the number
and nature of the intervals, and the systems which are framed out of them,
and the rhythms of the dance which correspond to them. And when you have a
similar knowledge of any other subject, you may be said to know that
subject. In speech again there are infinite varieties of sound, and some
one who was a wise man, or more than man, comprehended them all in the
classes of mutes, vowels, and semivowels, and gave to each of them a name,
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