A CENTURY OF METAPHYSICAL SYNTAX 



BY WILLIAM GARDNER HALE 



[William Gardner Hale, Professor and Head of the Department of Latin, Uni- 

 versity of Chicago, since 1892. b. Feb. 9, 1849. A.B. Harvard, 1870; Fellow 

 in Philosophy, Harvard, 1870-71; LL.D. Union; ibid. Princeton; Student at 

 Leipzig and Gottingen. Tutor in Latin, Harvard, 1877-80; Professor of Latin, 

 Cornell University, 1880-92. Member of the German Archaeological Institute of 

 Berlin, Athens, and Rome; American Philological Association (President, 1892- 

 93). Director of the American School of Classical Studies in Rome, 1905-06. 

 Author of The Cum-Constructions, 1888-89; The Anticipatory Subjunctive in 

 Greek and Latin, 1894; Did Verse-Ictus destroy Word- Accent in Roman Speech f 

 1896, etc.; A Latin Grammar (in collaboration with Carl D. Buck), 1903.] 



WHEN the invitation to take part in this Congress came to me, the 

 difficulty of surveying, in the allotted forty-five minutes, all the 

 problems presented by the Latin language problems in fields so 

 varied as those of the critical treatment of the contents of the various 

 authors, paleography in its more general aspects, epigraphy, gram- 

 mar on the side of forms, grammar on the side of syntax, grammar on 

 the side of meter, and the rest seemed insuperable. I was there- 

 upon assured that I might deal with all the problems, ox with any of 

 them. But my doubts were not at an end. I felt that the situation 

 demanded that your speakers should discuss some phase of the 

 subjects in which they were most practiced, and in which they had, 

 accordingly, the largest measure of faith in their own judgment. This 

 meant that, if I were to speak at all, it must be upon conceptions 

 and methods in the study of Latin syntax. But it was one of the 

 essential articles of my creed that no man can deal successfully 

 with problems of Latin syntax, if, as the plan of the committee seemed 

 to contemplate, he sedulously confined his eyes to the ground covered 

 by the Latin reservation. Again I was assured that I was at liberty 

 to say what I chose. I plan, therefore, without regard to barriers 

 of language, to discuss the way in which most writers to-day look 

 at questions of the origins of mood-uses. 



We are not aware, hi general, where our conceptions of mood- 

 forces came from. We do not even know whether they properly 

 belong together. What we have is an eclectic system. But the choices 

 made have for a long time not been made by a conscious process. 

 Each writer has in general accepted whatever seemed to him to 

 commend itself. I shall later show you a single sentence of three 

 lines, in which four radically different and mutually contradictory 

 schemes are combined. 



A satisfactory treatment of the subject would demand a discussion 

 of every phase of opinion from the beginnings of syntactical studies 



