Then Socrates examines the names of the various elements, virtues, and moral qualities, most of which he derives in a manner that would shock a modern philologist. Some of them, he says truly, have a foreign origin, inasmuch as the Greek borrowed many words from the Barbarians; "for the Barbarians are older than we are, and the original form of words may have been lost in the lapse of ages." The word dikaion—"justice"—says Socrates, has greatly puzzled him. Some one had told him, as a great mystery, that the word was the same as diaion—the subtle and penetrating power that enters into everything in creation; and when he inquired further, he was told that Justice was the Sun,—the piercing or burning element in nature. But when he quotes this beautiful notion with great glee to a friend, he is met by the satirical answer—"What is there then no justice in the world when the sun goes down?" And when Socrates begs his friend to tell him his own honest opinion, he says, "Fire in the abstract;" which is not very intelligible. Another says, "No,—not fire in the abstract, but the abstraction of heat in fire." A third professes to laugh at this, and says, with Anaxagoras, that Justice is Mind; for Mind, they say, has absolute power, and mixes with nothing, and governs all things, and permeates all things. At last, he says, he found himself in greater perplexity as to the nature of Justice than when he began his inquiry.
Then follow other derivations, more extravagant than any which we have noticed; but Socrates concludes with a long passage of serious etymology. We
