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Stranger
Str. And if any man has doubts about these oppositions, he must make investigations and advance better doctrines than these of ours; or if he finds pleasure in dragging words about and applying them to different things at different times, with the notion that he has invented something difficult to explain, our present argument asserts that he has taken up seriously matters which are not worth serious attention; for this process is neither clever nor difficult, whereas here now is something both difficult and beautiful.
Theaetetus
Theaet. What is it?
Stranger
Str. What I have spoken of before—the ability to let those quibbles go as of no account and to follow and refute in detail the arguments of a man who says that other is in a sense the same, or that the same is other, and to do this from that point of view and with regard for those relations which he presupposes for either of these conditions. But to show that in some sort of fashion the same is the other, and the other the same, and the great small, and the like unlike, and to take pleasure in thus always bringing forward opposites in the argument,—all that is no true refutation, but is plainly the newborn offspring of some brain that has just begun to lay hold upon the problem of realities.
5
Theaetetus
Theaet. Exactly so.
Stranger
Str. For certainly, my friend, the attempt to separate everything from everything else is not only not in good taste but also shows that a man is utterly uncultivated and unphilosophical.
Theaetetus
Theaet. Why so?
