118 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
‘“The boys are in the actor-to-action relation with an eating 
which is in the action-to-actee relation with the apples.” Of 
.the “active” sentence thus interpreted, “My apples are eaten 
by the boys”—with the meaning of “The apples are in the 
(but dimly seen) relation of actee-to-action with an eating 
which is in the action-to-actor (clearly seen) relation with the 
boys”—is, except in form, the exactly corresponding passive 
sentence. 
But if, as I suppose is proper, it be held that “eat” expresses, 
unassisted, both an actor-to-action (the eater-to-eating) relation 
and an action-to-actee (the eating-to-food) relation—-the former 
•commonly appreciated only as the subject-to-verb relation, and 
the latter only as the obj ect-to-verb relation*—-then that factor 
of the passive sentence which we call the passive verb—divid¬ 
ing function with the preposition, and itself expressing only 
the relation of actee-to-action—thus expresses only part of what 
the active verb expresses, and accordingly is not in the now 
•considered case its reverse or correlative. 
But I think it probable that many—most, perhaps—of those 
who say “The boys eat my apples” think directly from the 
boys to the apples, reaching an immediate relation (action- 
caused) between the two. To illustrate by a simpler case, I 
do not think of myself as brother to my father’s son, and further 
of that son as father to his daughter. I make a short-cut, think¬ 
ing of myself and her as in the uncle-to-niece relation. Ana¬ 
logously I seem not to think of boys as eaters in an eating in 
which further I conceive the apples as the food. Bather again 
I make a short-cut, thinking of the boys and apples in the re¬ 
lation of eater-to-food.f 
ISTow persons who, in saying “My apples are eaten by the 
boys,” mean “My apples are in food-to-eater relation with the 
boys,” use “are-eaten-by” as the exactly corresponding passive 
* This relation might be held to be expressed by the accusative 
inflection; and possibly it so is held in fact by users of the well-in¬ 
flected languages; but, in our own, it seems to m© tne transitiveness 
of a verb—its need of an attendant object—-indicates that it should 
be defined as naming “an action plus that action’s action-to-actee re¬ 
lation with ................” 
f It does not seem to me however in the least impossible that both 
