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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: Just as a note or two of music suffices to recall a whole piece to the
musician's or composer's mind, so a great principle or leading thought
suggests and arranges a world of particulars. The power of reflection is
not feebler than the faculty of sense, but of a higher and more
comprehensive nature. It not only receives the universals of sense, but
gives them a new content by comparing and combining them with one another.
It withdraws from the seen that it may dwell in the unseen. The sense only
presents us with a flat and impenetrable surface: the mind takes the world
to pieces and puts it together on a new pattern. The universals which are
detached from sense are reconstructed in science. They and not the mere
impressions of sense are the truth of the world in which we live; and (as
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