Page:On the Stratification of Language - Muller - 1868.djvu/9

4 rightly what they had failed to apprehend correctly. Plato's view of actual language, as far as it can be made out from the critical and negative rather than didactic and positive dialogue of Kratylos, seems to have been very much the same as his view of actual government. Both fall short of the ideal, and both are to be tolerated only in so far as they participate in the perfections of his ideal state and his ideal language. Plato's Kratylos is full of suggestive wisdom. It is one of those books which, as we read them again from time to time, seem every time like new books: so little do we perceive at first all that is pre-supposed in them:—the accumulated mould of thought, if I may say so, in which alone a philosophy like that of Plato could strike its roots and draw its support.

But while Plato shows a deeper insight into the mysteries of language than almost any philosopher that has come after him, he has no eyes for that marvellous harvest of words garnered up in our dictionaries, and in the dictionaries of all the races of the earth. With him language is almost synonymous with Greek, and though in one passage of the Kratylos he suggests that certain Greek words might have been borrowed from the Barbarians, and, more particularly, from the Phrygians, yet that remark, as coming from Plato, seems to be purely ironical, and though it contains, as we know, a germ of truth that has proved most fruitful in our modern science of language, it struck no root in the minds of Greek philosophers. How much our new science of language differs from the linguistic studies of the Greeks; how entirely the interest which Plato took in language is now supplanted by new interests,