Heracleiteans and Eleatics, but no man of sense would commit his soul in
such enquiries to the imposers of names...In this and other passages Plato
shows that he is as completely emancipated from the influence of 'Idols of
the tribe' as Bacon himself.

The lesson which may be gathered from words is not metaphysical or moral,
but historical. They teach us the affinity of races, they tell us
something about the association of ideas, they occasionally preserve the
memory of a disused custom; but we cannot safely argue from them about
right and wrong, matter and mind, freedom and necessity, or the other
problems of moral and metaphysical philosophy. For the use of words on
such subjects may often be metaphorical, accidental, derived from other
languages, and may have no relation to the contemporary state of thought
and feeling. Nor in any case is the invention of them the result of
philosophical reflection; they have been commonly transferred from matter
to mind, and their meaning is the very reverse of their etymology. Because
there is or is not a name for a thing, we cannot argue that the thing has
or has not an actual existence; or that the antitheses, parallels,
conjugates, correlatives of language have anything corresponding to them in
nature. There are too many words as well as too few; and they generalize
the objects or ideas which they represent. The greatest lesson which the
philosophical analysis of language teaches us is, that we should be above
language, making words our servants, and not allowing them to be our
masters.

Plato does not add the further observation, that the etymological meaning
of words is in process of being lost. If at first framed on a principle of
intelligibility, they would gradually cease to be intelligible, like those
of a foreign language, he is willing to admit that they are subject to many
changes, and put on many disguises. He acknowledges that the 'poor