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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: animal. Thus far we have not speech, but only the inarticulate expression
of feeling or emotion in no respect differing from the cries of animals;
for they too call to one another and are answered. But now suppose that
some one at a distance not only hears the sound, but apprehends the
meaning: or we may imagine that the cry is repeated to a member of the
society who had been absent; the others act the scene over again when he
returns home in the evening. And so the cry becomes a word. The hearer in
turn gives back the word to the speaker, who is now aware that he has
acquired a new power. Many thousand times he exercises this power; like a
child learning to talk, he repeats the same cry again, and again he is
answered; he tries experiments with a like result, and the speaker and the
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