Page:The Termination -κός, as used by Aristophanes for Comic Effect.djvu/4

430 Philosophy is the peculiar sphere of these adjectives in and their adverbs. Plato has 347 of them in the dialogues accepted by Christ (391 according to Ast's lexicon), and Aristotle between six and seven hundred. The extant fragments of the early philosophers and sophists do not justify us in attributing the sudden prominence in literature of this class of words to the example set by some one individual of commanding influence. It is due rather to the increased intellectual activity of the age and the consequent need of additional means for the expression of thought. The speculations of the philosophers and the growing tendency toward logical analysis demanded a more extended vocabulary. The suffix was among the available material which the language already possessed within itself, and, though before used comparatively little, it had great possibilities of productiveness, as its popularity in philosophic discourses and its free use in postclassic times prove. Plato and Xenophon have in common 27 words in that do not occur in the extant literature before their time so far as the Thesaurus shows, and Plato alone uses about 200 more that are not found in any earlier writer. In Campbell's list of 56 words from the Sophistes and 78 from the Politicus that are not used again by Plato, 44 in each group are words in, and of this number 41 in each dialogue are not found in the previous literature.