creature' imitation is supplemented by another 'poor creature,'--
convention. But he does not see that 'habit and repute,' and their
relation to other words, are always exercising an influence over them.
Words appear to be isolated, but they are really the parts of an organism
which is always being reproduced. They are refined by civilization,
harmonized by poetry, emphasized by literature, technically applied in
philosophy and art; they are used as symbols on the border-ground of human
knowledge; they receive a fresh impress from individual genius, and come
with a new force and association to every lively-minded person. They are
fixed by the simultaneous utterance of millions, and yet are always
imperceptibly changing;--not the inventors of language, but writing and
speaking, and particularly great writers, or works which pass into the
hearts of nations, Homer, Shakespear, Dante, the German or English Bible,
Kant and Hegel, are the makers of them in later ages. They carry with them
the faded recollection of their own past history; the use of a word in a
striking and familiar passage gives a complexion to its use everywhere
else, and the new use of an old and familiar phrase has also a peculiar
power over us. But these and other subtleties of language escaped the
observation of Plato. He is not aware that the languages of the world are
organic structures, and that every word in them is related to every other;
nor does he conceive of language as the joint work of the speaker and the
hearer, requiring in man a faculty not only of expressing his thoughts but
of understanding those of others.

On the other hand, he cannot be justly charged with a desire to frame
language on artificial principles. Philosophers have sometimes dreamed of
a technical or scientific language, in words which should have fixed
meanings, and stand in the same relation to one another as the substances
which they denote. But there is no more trace of this in Plato than there
is of a language corresponding to the ideas; nor, indeed, could the want of