THE WITNESS OF PHILOLOGY. 315 



from what I have called indication. For the sake of placing 

 this important fact beyond the reach of doubt, I will begin by 

 quoting the statements of a few among the leading authorities 

 upon the philology of the subject. 



" Primitive man would not trouble himself much with such 

 propositions as 'IMan is mortal,' 'Gold is heavy,' which are a 

 source of such unfailing delight to the formal logician ; but if 

 he found it necessary to employ permanent attribute-words, 

 would naturally throw them into what is called the attributive 

 form, by placing them in immediate proximity with the noun, 

 whose inflections they would afterwards assume. And so the 

 verb gradually came to assume the purely formal function of 

 predication. The use of verbs denoting action necessitated 

 the formation of verbs to denote ' rest,' ' continuance in state,' 

 and when, in course of time, it became necessary in certain 

 cases to predicate permanent as well as changing attributes, 

 these words were naturally employed for the purpose, and 

 such a sentence as 'The sun continues bright' was simply 'The 

 bright sun ' in another form. By degrees these verbs became 

 so worn away in meaning, gradually coming to signify simple 

 existence, that at last they lost all vestiges of meaning 

 whatever, and came simply to be marks of predication. Such 

 is the history of the verb ' to be,' which in popular language 

 has entirely lost even the sense of ' existence.' Again, in a 

 still more advanced state, it was found necessary to speak, not 

 only of things, but of their attributes. Thus such a sentence 

 as 'Whiteness is an attribute of snow,' has identically the same 

 meaning as 'Snow is white ' and 'White snow;' and the change 

 of ' white ' into ' whiteness ' is a purely formal device to enable 

 us to place an attribute-word as the subject of a proposition." * 



" Now comes a very important consideration, that not only 

 is the order of subject and predicate to a great extent con- 

 ventional, but that the very idea of the distinction between 

 subject and predicate is purely linguistic, and has no 

 foundation in the mind itself In the first place, there is no 



• Sweet, Words ^ Logic, and Grammar^ in Trans. Philol. Soc.^ 1876, pp. 

 486, 487. 



