such a language be felt until the sciences were far more developed. Those
who would extend the use of technical phraseology beyond the limits of
science or of custom, seem to forget that freedom and suggestiveness and
the play of association are essential characteristics of language. The
great master has shown how he regarded pedantic distinctions of words or
attempts to confine their meaning in the satire on Prodicus in the
Protagoras.

(5) In addition to these anticipations of the general principles of
philology, we may note also a few curious observations on words and sounds.
'The Eretrians say sklerotes for skleroter;' 'the Thessalians call Apollo
Amlos;' 'The Phrygians have the words pur, udor, kunes slightly changed;'
'there is an old Homeric word emesato, meaning "he contrived";' 'our
forefathers, and especially the women, who are most conservative of the
ancient language, loved the letters iota and delta; but now iota is changed
into eta and epsilon, and delta into zeta; this is supposed to increase the
grandeur of the sound.' Plato was very willing to use inductive arguments,
so far as they were within his reach; but he would also have assigned a
large influence to chance. Nor indeed is induction applicable to philology
in the same degree as to most of the physical sciences. For after we have
pushed our researches to the furthest point, in language as in all the
other creations of the human mind, there will always remain an element of
exception or accident or free-will, which cannot be eliminated.

The question, 'whether falsehood is impossible,' which Socrates
characteristically sets aside as too subtle for an old man (compare
Euthyd.), could only have arisen in an age of imperfect consciousness,
which had not yet learned to distinguish words from things. Socrates
replies in effect that words have an independent existence; thus
anticipating the solution of the mediaeval controversy of Nominalism and