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[259e] shows that a man is utterly uncultivated and unphilosophical.

Theaetetus
Why so?

Stranger
The complete separation of each thing from all is the utterly final obliteration of all discourse. For our power of discourse is derived from the interweaving of the classes or ideas with one another.1

Theaetetus
True.


1 The denial, that is to say, of all the interrelations of ideas leads to purely negative results. Examples of this are the exclusive antithesis of being and not-being and the mutual exclusion of rest and motion. The difficulty is solved at once when we recognize that positive and negative are necessarily interwoven in the nature of things, that the negative has only a relative existence and is not the opposite of the positive, but only different from it.

Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 12 translated by Harold N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1921.

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