The gutenberg galaxy 117 So far as Plato’s thinking can be considered representative of the thinking of the Greeks, it is very clear that the word, whether thought or written, still retained, for them, and from our point of view, vast powers in the ‘real’ world. Although at last it was seen as nonbehavioural itself, it now came to be regarded as the fount and origin not only of behaviour but of all discovery: it was the only key to knowledge, and thought alone—in words or figures—could unlock all doors for understanding the world. In a sense, indeed, the power of words or other visual symbols became greater than before…now verbal and mathematical thought became the only truth, and the whole sensory world came to be regarded as illusory, except insofar as thoughts were heard or seen. In his dialogue of the Cratylus, named for his teacher of language and grammar, Plato has Socrates say (438): But if these things are only to be known through names, how can we suppose that the givers of names had knowledge, or were legislators before there were names at all, and therefore before they could have known them? Cratylus: I believe, Socrates, the true account of the matter to be, that a power more than human gave things their first names, and that the names which were thus given are necessarily their true names. This view of Cratylus was the basis of most language study until the Renaissance. It is rooted in the old oral “magic” of the “momentary deity” kind such as is favoured again today for various reasons. That it is most alien to merely literary and visual culture is easily found in the remarks of incredulity which Jowett supplies as his contribution to the dialogue. Carothers turns to David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (p. 9) for further orientation in his queries concerning the effects of writing on non- literate communities. Riesman had characterized our own Western world as developing in its “typical members a social character whose conformity is insured by their tendency to acquire early in life an internalized set of goals.” Riesman made no effort to discover why the manuscript culture of the ancient and medieval worlds should not have conferred inner direction, nor why a print culture should inevitably confer inner direction. That is part of the business of the present book. But it can be said at once that “inner direction” depends upon a “fixed point of view.” A stable, consistent character is one with an unwavering outlook, an almost hypnotized visual stance, as it were. Manuscripts were altogether too slow and uneven a matter to provide either a fixed point of view or the habit of gliding steadily on single planes of thought and information. As we shall see, manuscript culture is intensely audile-tactile compared to print