Cratylus.
Introduction.
arts. Was there a correctness in words, and were they given by
nature or convention ? In the presocratic philosophy manlcind
had been striving to attain an expression of their ideas ; and now
they were beginning to aslc themselves whether the expression
might not be distinguished from the idea ? They were also seek-
ing to distinguish the parts of speech and to enquire into the
relation of subject and predicate. Grammar and logic were
moving about somewhere in the depths of the human soul, but
they were not yet awakened into consciousness and had not found
names for themselves, or terms by which they might be expressed.
Of these beginnings of the study of language we know little, and
there necessarily arises an obscurity when the surroundings of
such a work as the Cratylus are taken away. Moreover, in this,
as in most of the dialogues of Plato, allowance has to be made for
the character of Socrates. For the theory of language can only
be propounded by him in a manner which is consistent with his
own profession of ignorance. Hence his ridicule of the new school
of etymology is interspersed with many declarations, 'that he
knows nothing,' ' that he has learned from Euthyphro,' and tlie
like. Even the truest things which he says are depreciated by
himself. He professes to be guessing, but the guesses of Plato
are better than all the other theories of the ancients respecting
language put together.
The dialogue hardly derives any light from Plato's other writings, and still less from Scholiasts and Neoplatonist writers. Socrates must be interpreted from himself, and on first reading we certainly have a difficulty in understanding his drift, or his relation to the two other interlocutors in the dialogue. Does he agree with Cratylus or with Hermogenes, and is he serious in those fanciful etymologies, extending over more than half the dialogue, which he seems so greatly to relish ? Or is he serious in part only ; and can we separate his jest from his earnest? — Sunt bona, sunt quaedam mediocria, sunt mala phira. Most of them are ridiculously bad, and yet among them are found, as if by accident, principles of philology which are unsurpassed in any ancient writer, and even in advance of any philologer of the last century. May we suppose that Plato, like Lucian, has been amusing his fancy by writing a comedy in the form of a prose dialogue.' And what is the final result of the enquiry? Is Plato an upholder of the con-