should get at primary names (he says), and separate the letters, which have all a distinct meaning-thus l expresses "smoothness," r "motion," a "size," and e "length." When we have fixed their meaning, we can form them into syllables and words; and add and subtract until we get a good and true image of the idea we intend to express. Of course there are degrees of accuracy in this process, where nature is helped out by custom; and a name, like a picture, may be a more or less perfect likeness of a person or thought. Great truths may be learned through names; but there are higher forms of knowledge, which can only be learnt from the ideas themselves, of which our words are but faint impressions; and "no man of sense will put himself or his education in the power of names," or believe that the world is in a perpetual flux and transition, "like a leaky vessel." And with this parting blow at Heraclitus, the Dialogue, with its mixture of truth and fiction, of jest and earnest, comes to an end. But, wild and fanciful as many of the derivations undoubtedly are, it must still be admitted that "the guesses of Plato are better than all the other theories of the ancients respecting language put together."[1]
THEÆTETUS.
Euclid (not the mathematician, but the philosopher of that name) meets his friend Terpsion at the door of his own house in Megara; and their conversation happens to turn upon Theætetus, whom Euclid has just seen carried up towards Athens, almost dead of dysen-
- ↑ Jowett's Plato, i. 620
