Owen—Relations Expressed by the Passive Voice. 95’ 
shooter did not shoot the bird alone; he also shot the gun, the' 
powder and the shot, a streak of flame, a disagreeable noise and,, 
by recoil, perhaps a bruise upon his shoulder. He shot the 
partridge for his sister, for her supper, but unluckily to pieces. 
Being on the spot, I take my own association with the action 
seriously. In speech indeed we all reveal an adequate appre¬ 
ciation of the “quorum pars magna fui.” Hence expressions 
in Elizabethan parlance such as “Perkins pulls me (the dative 
of the bystander? or, say, remote associate?) a shilling out of his 
pocket and gives it to a beggar.” Analogously, then, “Brown 
shot me a partridge for his sister.” Indeed—politeness recom¬ 
mends no less—“He shot him a partridge for his sister;” and, 
if politeness reach the Spanish multiplicity, “He shot her a 
partridge for his sister.” 
Suppose now I examine no less closely into what, it seems 
to me, occasions action (pp. 9-10), aids it or abets it. Hot 
to speak of motor nerves and muscles easy to dissociate from 
mental self, I notice that the shooter’s finger made a quite 
important contribution to the shooting. The trigger also was 
a far from negligible factor—and the hammer and the spring 
whose pent up energy, once liberated, wielded it to strike the 
detonating blow. Indeed I’m not so sure that after all the 
shooter shot the gun at the partridge. It may be rather that 
he shot the partridge with the gun. Perhaps the latter as a 
whole and in its parts, and even in its contents, should be 
sensed as implicated in the action rather as its co-producer than 
as wrought-upon by it. Of this at least I’m well assured, that, 
if we so are minded, we shall think of action as effected not 
alone by actors, but additionally by co-actors or sub-actors—say 
by coadjutors. I am ready to conceive of action on the one hand 
as divergent in its influence, and on the other as resultant of 
a multiple convergence. What we recognize as objects more 
or less distinctly indirect, are matched by what we know as 
means or instrument, concomitant, et cetera. It suits me at 
this moment best to think of them as subjects more or less— 
now more, now less—direct or indirect, suggesting thus a sort 
of instability in them; for this, it seems to me, was basal in 
the evolution of the passive voice. 
