Owen—Relations Expressed by the Passive Voice. 85 
per-to-lower. If now I wish to indicate the reverse relation of 
overlain-to-overlier, or lower-to-upper, I have only to make use 
of “underlies.” 
It is true that—thanks perhaps in part to long perversion 
of my brain by talk of verbs and their objects—I think, in 
“The box overlies the book,” of the box as “doing something” 
to the book; and that, in “The book underlies the box,” I vio¬ 
late this notion by thinking rather of the book as doing some¬ 
thing to the box. However, as this notion strictly is unwar¬ 
ranted, and not particularly plausible, I hardly imagine that 
unwillingness to violate it would of itself alone prevail on lan¬ 
guage to produce the passive form “is overlain.” 
Ho doubt a careful search would bring to light a number 
of verbs not ranked as passive which are able to suggest relations 
the reverse of those expressed by certain other verbs; but I 
confine myself to one more illustration. If I put in a shal¬ 
low pan of water a sponge that is not too dry, in a little while 
I find the sponge-pores occupied by water. What has happened 
I may indicate by saying, as I choose, “The water wet the 
sponge” or “The sponge absorbed the water.” That is, once 
more a verb in the active voice (“absorbed”) is merely able to 
perform essentially the functions of the passive, as performed 
for instance in “The sponge was wet by the water.” The in¬ 
teresting difference in the meanings of “absorb” and “wet” 
may be however worth more careful observation. 
That we make witch-work of the laws of matter in the mental 
picturing that language registers, I have already intimated on 
p. 3. In the present illustration we may catch ourselves twice 
over “in flagrante,” one “delictum” offering too an outright 
contradiction to the other. I mean that both the wetting by 
the water and the opposite absorbing by the sponge exhibit the 
erroneous conception overthrown by Hewton—the conception 
that in action things are active. Till his day we mainly 
doubted not that apples did their falling of themselves, without 
the help of gravity; and linguistically they continue still to 
do so. Thus, in saying that the apple fell, I mean that it 
•performed the act of falling—caused to exist, between itself 
