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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: he will only know his fellow in art or wisdom, and no one else.
That is evident, he said.
But then what profit, Critias, I said, is there any longer in wisdom or
temperance which yet remains, if this is wisdom? If, indeed, as we were
supposing at first, the wise man had been able to distinguish what he knew
and did not know, and that he knew the one and did not know the other, and
to recognize a similar faculty of discernment in others, there would
certainly have been a great advantage in being wise; for then we should
never have made a mistake, but have passed through life the unerring guides
of ourselves and of those who are under us; and we should not have
attempted to do what we did not know, but we should have found out those
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