nowledge, and were
illustrated in a similar manner by the analogy of the arts. Was there
a correctness in words, and were they given by nature or convention?
In the presocratic philosophy mankind had been striving to attain an
expression of their ideas, and now they were beginning to ask themselves
whether the expression might not be distinguished from the idea? They
were also seeking 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 the 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 quaedum mediocria, sunt mala plura. 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 o