196 LATIN LANGUAGE 



ary, the former are regularly used with tenses of the present or future, 

 the latter with tenses of the past. The next step naturally would 

 be to make the difference between the two merely one of tense, 

 the mood being the same in both. This step was actually and 

 fully taken by Kiihner, in his Greek grammar, in 1833. 



The effect of Matthia's hint that the Optative was only a secondary 

 Subjunctive has passed away in the last quarter of a century. The 

 effect of his shifting of the supposed ground of the Optative to make 

 it that of Thought, and putting the Subjunctive likewise under this 

 category, has not passed away. It is, as we shall presently see, the 

 system under which we are mostly living. 



In the year 1808, Dissen, in a Habilitationsschrift, De tempor- 

 ibus et modis verbi Graeci, gave another twist to the doctrine of 

 the moods. He made the Imperative the mood of Will, the old 

 conception, with a new name. The Optative he made to express a 

 conscious thought, that is, the recognition of something as the thought 

 of some one else, or of one's self at an earlier time. This was a mod- 

 ification of Matthia's view. For the Subjunctive, he constructed 

 a modification of Hermann's view. Hermann had made the Sub- 

 junctive the mood of Objective Possibility, of that which in the very 

 nature and condition of things (per ipsarum rerum condicionem) is 

 capable of taking place. In order that this should be shown, there 

 had to be a main sentence, on which the other depended. Dissen, 

 throwing emphasis on the side of " the very nature and condition of 

 things," made the Subjunctive the mood of that which hung upon 

 something else, in other words, the Mood of Conditionality. Natur- 

 ally, then, the Indicative became, in his system, the Mood of Un- 

 conditionality. 



The particle av, according to Dissen, in itself expresses Condi- 

 tionality. This is the reason why all connectives compounded with 



av (as CTrav, 1 fTTfiBav, eav, orav, OTTOTCLV, fvr' av) take the Subjunctive. The 



same holds for the conjunctions meaning "before," "so long as," or 

 "until" (as irplv av, <i>s av, 5<f>pa av, la av). The same holds, further, 

 for all relative words with av (as 05, o<ms, otos, OTTOU, o0ev); for the 

 sense is the same as if, instead of the relative, one were to use an eav 

 or oTTorav ("if" or "when") with a demonstrative. 



This combination, made by Dissen in his working-out of his 

 metaphysical material, remains in full force to-day, having been 

 taken up later by Thiersch, by Reisig, and by Hermann himself, 

 and then passed down from one German worker to another. In the 

 English-speaking world, it is to be found in the grammars of Goodwin , 

 Allen-Hadley, Goodell, Babbitt, Bevier's Brief Greek Syntax, Monro's 

 Homeric Grammar, and even Thompson's Greek Grammar. We are 

 learning and teaching the doctrine, nearly a century after it was 

 1 I give these forms as Dissen writes them. 



