. In this part of the
dialogue his dread of committing impiety, the pretended derivation of
his wisdom from another, the extravagance of some of his etymologies,
and, in general, the manner in which the fun, fast and furious, vires
acquirit eundo, remind us strongly of the Phaedrus. The jest is a long
one, extending over more than half the dialogue. But then, we remember
that the Euthydemus is a still longer jest, in which the irony is
preserved to the very end. There he is parodying the ingenious follies
of early logic; in the Cratylus he is ridiculing the fancies of a new
school of sophists and grammarians. The fallacies of the Euthydemus are
still retained at the end of our logic books; and the etymologies of the
Cratylus have also found their way into later writers. Some of these are
not much worse than the conjectures of Hemsterhuis, and other critics
of the last century; but this does not prove that they are serious. For
Plato is in advance of his age in his conception of language, as much as
he is in his conception of mythology. (Compare Phaedrus.)

When the fervour of his etymological enthusiasm has abated, Socrates
ends, as he has begun, with a rational explanation of language. Still
he preserves his 'know nothing' disguise, and himself declares his first
notions about names to be reckless and ridiculous. Having explained
compound words by resolving them into their original elements, he now
proceeds to analyse simple words into the letters of which they are
composed. The Socrates who 'knows nothing,' here passes into the
teacher, the dialectician, the arranger of species. There is nothing in
this part of the dialogue which is either weak or extravagant. Plato is
a supporter of the Onomatopoetic theory of language; that is to say, he
supposes words to be formed by the imitation of ideas in sounds; he also
recognises the effect of time, the influence of foreign languages, the
desire of euphony, to be formative principles; and he admits a certain
element of chance. But he gives no imitation in all this that he is
preparing the way for the construction of an ideal language. Or that
he has any Eleatic speculation to oppose to the Heracleiteanism of
Cratylus.

The theory of language which is propounded in the Cratylus is in
accordance with the later phase of the philosophy of Plato, and would
have been regarded by him as in the main true. The dialogue is also a
satire on the philological fancies of the day. Socrates