Owen—Hybrid Parts of Speech. 
177 
be my danger vouched for as true, and not a mere unvouched for sug¬ 
gestion. In short, the mechanism of speech was surely developed to 
express what may be variously known as an opinion, a belief, or 
knowledge, or a judgment—not however an unendorsed conception or, 
say, the mere material of a judgments 
The infinitive was however very possibly employed before the other 
verbal forms. But, in such employment, no doubt the speaker’s belief 
was either incorporated in the meaning of the infinitive, or regularly 
supplied therewith—it makes no essential difference which—in order 
to give to what it co-operated in expressing, a value sufficient to war¬ 
rant expression. In short, although the infinitive may well have been 
the first employed verbal form, it must, if so, have been employed first 
in the expression of judgments—not, that is, in its modern function of 
expressing mere conception. 
First then in the order of linguistic development comes the expression 
of the judgment. The expression of the isolated conception never 
comes, for the very reason that it is not the first to come—• because 
it is not worth expression. 43 When the conception is expressed, it is as 
part of a larger thought, of which the fundamental element is a judg¬ 
ment; and just so surely as the simple, in thought as well as in ex¬ 
pression, precedes the complex, just so surely the minimal judgment 
expressible, for instance, by “The sun exceeds the moon” (by whatever 
form in fact expressed) preceded the extended judgment expressible by 
“Astronomers declare the sun to exceed the moon.” I hold indeed that 
the expression of mere conception, which must figure only as an 
element of extended judgment, was not attempted, until the use of 
means adopted to express the minimal judgment had, by repetition, 
become habitual. 
Now the particular linguistic means employed to express a judgment 
imply the construction of the judgment according to a particular plan. 
As I have elsewhere argued, belief in truth or untruth, which being 
added to a conception makes it a judgment, might have been associated 
with the total conception (or with its first, or with its final term). 
In actual practice it was associated with the mid-term or relation. 
This for present purposes is adequately indicated by the fact, that 
untruth, expressed by the negative adverb, is made to bear upon the 
verb; that truth is, as you please, expressed by or implied with the 
verb; that belief, in well-developed speech, is indicated by a modifica¬ 
tion of the verbal form—that is, by the indicative mode. In short, 
when a conception is developed into a judgment—when, in other words, 
to a conception there is added belief in its truth or untruth—the ad¬ 
dition is, in linguistic thought, associated not with the conception re¬ 
garded as a whole, but with the relation thereof—which latter is of 
course attended by its fellow terms. 
42 For the translation of emotion into thought descriptive of emotion, 
see “Interrogative Thought,” page 360. 
43 For the poetical use of mere suggestion, see page 120, note 14. 
