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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: many, but of the few, who were his 'law-givers'--'the legislator with the
dialectician standing on his right hand,' in Plato's striking image, who
formed the manners of men and gave them customs, whose voice and look and
behaviour, whose gesticulations and other peculiarities were instinctively
imitated by them,--the 'king of men' who was their priest, almost their
God...But these are conjectures only: so little do we know of the origin
of language that the real scholar is indisposed to touch the subject at
all.
(2) There are other errors besides the figment of a primitive or original
language which it is time to leave behind us. We no longer divide
languages into synthetical and analytical, or suppose similarity of
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