318 Report S.A A. Advancement of Science. 



serve I It simply serves to give a feeling of life and movement and so 

 of greater reality to the sentence. For the mind apprehends more 

 vividly what is put before it if the sense of motion is conveyed, just as 

 our idea of a circle as an immobile ring is not so vivid and fertile a 

 conception as our idea of it as a point moving at a fixed distance from 

 a given point. 



The division into subject and predicate makes for clearness in a 

 sentence like the one given above. It implies that sentences consist 

 of two parts, one of which, the subject, we know already ; the other, 

 the predicate, gives us new information concerning the subject. This 

 is a good analysis of a philosophic definition and such-like sentences. 

 But, as we shall see immediately, in most sentences there are not 

 simply two ideas, but often four or five distinct ideas, and the act of 

 predication must think all four or five together. The notion that a 

 .sentence must be divisible into two parts, subject and predicate, seems 

 to arise from an idea that we can think only two things together at 

 once, whereas we can, and generally do, think several things together. 



We now begin the work of analysing the simple action sentence ; 

 but the new analysis promised will turn out to be a \ery ancient 

 analysis indeed, older than the scientific study of grammar. For the 

 method will be simply to use that ancient and interesting family of 

 words, the interrogative pronouns and adverbs. Taking the action as 

 our central idea, we shall ask : (1) Who did if? (2) On whom was it 

 done ? (3) For whom was it done ? (4) How was it done 1 (5) The 

 interrogatives of place — Where, whence and whither, and how far ? 

 (6) The interrogatives of time — When and how long? The answers 

 to these questions, it will be found, cover most of the field of primitive 

 thought. Take an action of thrilling interest like a murder-tragedy ; 

 they give — the place ; the time ; three principal dramatis personae, and 

 the instrument. 



It will be observed that one important interrogative has been 

 omitted — namely, Whj^ ? This interrogative will be discussed when 

 we come to the complex sentence. 



We shall consider the first two questions together, Who did it? 

 and On wh(^m was it done ? subject and object, as they are called ; for, 

 being antithetic, they will illustrate one another. 



Victor and victim, slayer and slain, eater and eaten give the 

 primitive ideas of these two grammatical conceptions. In his early 

 struggle for existence on the earth, when the larger carnivora were 

 still common, man's energy must ha\e been mainly directed to the two 

 great ends (i) of killing that he might eat, and (ii) of escaping the fate 

 of being eaten. 



But we shall perceive more clearly the difterent feelings associated 

 with the ideas of subject and object, if we consider the words for the 

 first personal pronoun, when used as subject and object respectively, 

 viz., " I " and " me." For it is from the thoughts and feelings we have 

 of ourselves that we obtain our ideas of the thoughts and feelings of 

 other people. From the thoughts and feelings of ourselves as subject 

 and object, we come by our thouglits of subject- and oVjject in general. 



