116 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
But recognition of the verb as verb of the object* takes the 
inconvenient form of recognition that the object is the object of 
the verb. Accordingly, to feel the oneness of the total thought 
experienced as “The boys in relation with an eating, itself in 
relation with my apples”—to feel this oneness as prescribed by 
Grammar—looking in “The boys eat my apples” first from left 
to right, I sense “The boys” and “eat” in the relation of a sub¬ 
ject to its verb; but to sense, as Grammar does, the “eat” and 
“apples” in a further indispensable relation—that of object to 
its verb—I am required to look from right to left. Thus pro¬ 
ceeding, I appreciate that somehow “boys” is in relation with 
an action which in film is still more “somehow” in relation 
with “my apples.” 
In the active voice, to generalize upon my illustration, Gram¬ 
mar fails entirely to sense the actor-to-aetee relations (e. g., 
between the boys and apples, that of eater-to-food)—senses the 
relations of actor-to-action (e. g. that of boys to eating) very 
dimly—senses the relations of action-to-aetee (e. g. that of 
eating to the apples) still more dimly, also very awkwardly, 
perhaps the best appreciation of the last relation being indi¬ 
cated by the class-room question: what does “eat”, for instance, 
“take as object?”. 
Bewildered by unnatural conceptions reached in dealing with 
the trio formed by actor, action and actee, it hardly could be 
hoped that Grammar would fare better when confronted with 
the more perplexing trio formed by the actee, the action and 
the actor. Imprimis, in e. g. “My apples are eaten by the 
boys,” to recognize the food-to-eater relation—the reverse of an 
eater-to-food relation which the active voice had not succeeded 
in revealing to grammarians—was plainly out of the question. 
But the way was cleared for truer apprehension of the other 
possible relations by a fortunate forgetting that the nominative 
noun had been supposed to name the doer of the action—the 
accusative, what suffers it. Though presented by a nominative 
* Such expressions as “Les pommes que j’ai mangel,” in which 
the (compound) verb may be said to agree with both its subject and 
its object, plainly lose importance in the rather disconcerting in¬ 
verse order of the verb and object. 
