Page:The Dialogues of Plato v. 1.djvu/17



Rh from the original to the copy (Rep. vi. 501 A). His calling- is not held in much honour by the world of scholars ; yet he himself may be excused for thinking it a kind of glory to have lived so many years in the companionship of one of the greatest of human intelligences, and in some degree, more perhaps than others, to have had the privilege of understanding him (cp. Sir Joshua Reynolds' Lectures : Disc. XV. sub fin.).

There are fundamental differences in Greek and English, pf which some may be managed while others remain intractable, (i). The structure of the Greek language is partly adversative and alternative, and partly inferential ; that is to say, the members of a sentence are either opposed to one another, or one of them expresses the cause or effect or condition or reason of another. The two tendencies may be called the horizontal and perpen- dicular lines of the language ; and the opposition or inference is often much more one of words than of ideas. But modern languages have rubbed off this adversative and inferential form : they have fewer links of connexion, there is less mortar in the interstices, and they are content to place sentences side by side, leaving their relation to one another to be gathered from their position or from the context. The difficulty of preserving the effect of the Greek is increased by the want of adversative and inferential particles in English, and by the nice sense of tautology which characterizes all modern languages. We cannot have two ' buts ' or two ' fors ' in the same sentence where the Greek repeats aA.A.a or yap. There is a similar want of particles expressing the various gradations of objective and subjective thought — itov, 87;, /^?V', ij-^vtoi, and the like, which are so thickly scattered over the Greek page. Further, we can only realize to a very imperfect VOL. I.