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221 attributed to the Greek Verb. 221 does not think he ivill be there. It would be well perhaps if grammarians, and indeed all system-makers, when they are driving their triumphant car along amid the prostrate victims of their speculations, and casting an exulting eye over the train manacled by their despotical rules, had a monitor to cry in their ears. Remember that thou art a man. A number of peculiarities in language, which at present seem to hold out insuperable difficulties, would become easily intelligible if we only took into the account that it was framed and fashioned by beings with human notions and feelings. But to return to the so-called perfect middle: that it has no good title to be called so, is sufficiently proved by the fact stated by Buttmann (p. 370), that in all cases where a verb has a regular middle voice, with its appropriate reflex signi- fication, the perfect and plusperfect passive, and they alone, are used as the perfect and plusperfect of that voice, and possess that signification along with their own. By this re- mark the whole phenomenon of the middle voice is very much simplified. It no longer appears to us as an incongruous and perplexing patchwork of active and passive forms, mixt to- gether one cannot tell how or why. We perceive that throughout it is nothing else than the passive verb, used un- der a peculiar modification of its meaning, and illustrating the tendency of the Greeks in early times to look upon themselves in all reflex acts, whether external or internal, as patients rather than agents : a tendency which is exempli- fied in every page of the Homeric poems, and which belongs more or less to every people in an early stage of civilization, before the nation comes of age, and acquires the conscious- ness along with the free use of its powers. This seems to be the reason why so many of the verbs employed by the Greeks to denote states of mind or of feeling have a passive form ; such as (ppd^o/uiai, OLOfxai {plfxai)^ aicf6avof.iai^ cr/ceTrro- yucttj eTTiCTTa/uiat, j3ovXoiULaL^ a^a/xat, ijooixaij ixaLVoixai, In some tenses indeed, in which a variety of forms presented them- selves, one of them was allotted more peculiarly to the pas- sive signification, another to the middle : that instinct, which in all languages is evermore silently at work in desynony- mizing words, as Coleridge terms it, and giving definiteness to the speech of a people in proportion as its thoughts become