STRANGER: Well, fair sirs, we say to them, what is this participation, which you assert of both? Do you agree with our recent definition?
THEAETETUS: What definition?
STRANGER: We said that being was an active or passive energy, arising out of a certain power which proceeds from elements meeting with one another. Perhaps your ears, Theaetetus, may fail to catch their answer, which I recognize because I have been accustomed to hear it.
THEAETETUS: And what is their answer?
STRANGER: They deny the truth of what we were just now saying to the aborigines about existence.
THEAETETUS: What was that?
STRANGER: Any power of doing or suffering in a degree however slight was held by us to be a sufficient definition of being?
THEAETETUS: True.
STRANGER: They deny this, and say that the power of doing or suffering is confined to becoming, and that neither power is applicable to being.
THEAETETUS: And is there not some truth in what they say?