78 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
grace may be said. I bardly think however that we heed these 
differences, or others of their class. What occupies attention 
is not a difference between the cannibal’s eating and his being- 
eaten; for his being-eaten is merely after all itself an eating— 
the missionary’s eating. Accordingly the difference between the 
cannibal’s eating and his being-eaten reduces to a difference 
between two eatings—his and the missionary’s—more specifi¬ 
cally, say, two dinings; and, howsoever much we amplify or 
sense these in their details, we seem, as said above, to heed 
their difference very little. What is heeded rather is the crucial 
question: Who is diner ?—Who is dinner ? 
This fallacy of differentiated doing and being-done should 
occupy us only long enough, it seems to me, to laugh it out of 
court. Tor anyone who may think otherwise I do my best in 
argument on pp. 65-71. Meantime let the cannibalistic dinner 
last a moment longer. Let it pose in your imagination as a 
drama. Let me carry figurative juggling so far as this: the 
substitution of the passive for, the active does not change the 
play (the essential nature of the eating) ; and surely no inflec¬ 
tion of the verb could change the players (say “denature” can¬ 
nibal or missionary.) Inflection might however assign or re¬ 
assign their parts (of diner and dinner). You, who played 
Macbeth to my Macduff in an active presentation, may ex¬ 
change with me in a passive. 
The hint derivable from play and players is no doubt in¬ 
accurate. I mean it only to suggest that study of the passive 
voice should give up any being-done distinguishable from doing; 
that, in a doing, two are likely to be implicated—to partici¬ 
pate; and that the nature of the implication, and the mutual 
relation of participants, may vary. Yow it calls for little 
straining of imagination, to suppose that both the active and 
the passive voices may express this nature—also this relation— 
tlhe passive differing in such expression from the active. In¬ 
deed it seems to me that this precisely is the passive function; 
but I can hardly make my opinion plausible or even clear, ex¬ 
cept by leading up to it through further observations. 
These I shall confine so far as possible to verbs expressing 
genuine action, which, as I suppose, we all conceive as roughly, 
