But the interest which those ancient Greek philosophers took in language was purely philosophical. It was the form, far more than the matter of speech which seemed to them a subject worthy of philosophical speculation. The idea that there was, even in their days, an immense mass of accumulated speech to be sifted, to be analyzed, and to be accounted for somehow, before any theories on the nature of language could be safely started, hardly ever entered their minds; or when it did, as we see here and there in Plato’s “Kratylos,” it soon vanished, without leaving any permanent impression. Each people and each generation has its own problems to solve. The problem that occupied Plato in his “Kratylos” was, if I understand him rightly, the possibility of a perfect language, a correct, true, or ideal language, a language founded on his own philosophy, his own system of types or ideas. He was too wise a man to attempt, like Bishop Wilkins, the actual construction of a philosophical language. But, like Leibniz, he just lets us see that a perfect language is conceivable, and that the chief reason of the imperfections of real language must be found in the fact that its original framers were ignorant of the true nature of things, ignorant of dialectic philosophy, and therefore incapable of naming rightly what they had failed to apprehend correctly. Plato’s view of actual language, as far as it can be made out from the critical and negative rather than didactic and positive dialogue of “Kratylos,” seems to have been very much the same as his view of actual government. Both fall short of the ideal, and both are to be tolerated only in so far as they participate in the perfections of an ideal state and an ideal language.[2] Plato’s “Kratylos” is full of suggestive wisdom. It is one of those books which, as we read them again from time to time, seem every time like new books: so little do we perceive at first all that is pre-supposed in them,--the accumulated mould of thought, if I may say so, in which alone a philosophy like that of Plato could strike its roots and draw its support.