420 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
equivalent to “I seek a servant —who is faithful ” wlxicli is a 
mere variation upon “I seek a servant. He is faithful.” The 
second is, however, regularly expressed by a sentence exactly 
equivalent to “I seek a servant who be faithful that is, I seek 
a particular kind of servant. How it is natural to expect that 
what is meant by each italicised expression will be made the 
basis of a question. Such a question, once reduced to> the usual 
brevity, would appear in either one of the following forms: 
“Who is faithful ?” and 
“Who be faithful ?” 
I cannot, however, see that my desire to be informed is any 
less completely felt, or any less surely vouched for (as I shall 
later argue) in the subjunctive question, than in the other. I 
therefore hold to merely this, that the descriptive element of the 
question may be unassertive—a possibility sometimes realized in 
several languages. 
The special importance of this usage is the guidance which 
it offers to the search for that member of a question which as¬ 
serts desire. Tf it be; true (as I shall argue) that a question 
always does assert desire—and also true that the defining ele¬ 
ment of the question sometimes does not assert—then surely 
desire-assertion will at least sometimes be found outside of the 
descriptive verb. For instance, in the question, “Who killed 
Lincoln ?,” I shall surely sometimes find outside of “killed” the 
assertion of my desire (that you tell me who killed Lincoln). 
Desire to be told desideratum 
When the desired element of thought has been identified, no 
doubt the major difficulty of the question is overcome. But the 
wish to be told this element should also be made evident. The 
words “killed Lincoln” may succeed in causing you to fix your 
attention on the idea (e. g., that expressed bv “Booth”) which 
I wish you to put into my mind. But, in fixing thus your at¬ 
tention, you merely parallel the act of him who obligingly car¬ 
ries 1 out my request to “stick my fork into the biggest one of 
those potatoes yonder.” What I wish to obtain is, in each case, 
selected from its fellows; but I do not in either case make it 
unignorably clear that what has been selected I also wish to ob¬ 
tain. Unless my hearer be sufficiently acute and obliging, the 
potato may remain in the dish, and the desired idea may remain 
in another mind. Its revelation to me could only be the result 
