It is also of extreme importance to mark a great defect and imperfection, in this respect, of the Latin language. Such words as _lectio_, _dictio_, _actio_, are derived with equal readiness either from the supine, _lectum_, _dictum_, _actum_; or from the participle, _lectus_, _dictus_, _actus_. The supine is _active_, the participle, _passive_. From this circumstance probably it is, that {308} these abstract terms in the Latin language possess both the active and passive signification; and by this most unfortunate ambiguity have proved a fertile source of obscurity and confusion. This defect of the Latin language is the more to be lamented by us, that it has infected our own language; for as we have borrowed from the Latin language a great proportion of our abstract terms, we have transplanted the mischievous equivocation along with them. This ambiguity the Greek language happily avoided: thus it had [Greek: pra=xis] and [Greek: pra=gma] the first for the active signification of _actio_, the latter the passive.[85] [Editor's footnote 85: I apprehend that [Greek: pra=gma] is not an abstract but a concrete term, and does not express the attribute of being done, but the thing done--the effect which results from the completed action.--_Ed._] Of the abstract terms, of genuine English growth, derived from the concrete names of action, or verbs, the participle of the past tense supplied a great number, merely dropping the adjective, and assuming the substantive form. Thus, weight, a word which we had occasion to notice before, is the participle weighed, with the connotation dropped: stroke is merely struck; the _thing_ struck, the connotation, being left out: thought is the past participle passive of the verb to think, and differs from the participle in nothing, but that the participle, the adjective, has the connotation; the abstract, the substantive, has it not. Whether the concrete, or the abstract, is the term employed, is in such cases always indicated by the context; and, therefore, no particular mark to distinguish them is required. {309} In our non-inflected language, a facility is afforded in forming a non-connotative from the connotative, in the active voice of verbs; because the connotative word is always distinguished by the presence of the persons of the verb, or that of some part of the auxiliary verb. The same word, therefore, answers for the abstract, as for the concrete; it being of course the abstract, when none of the marks of the concrete are present. Thus the word love, is both the verb or the connotative, and the substantive or the non-connotative; thus also fear, walk, ride, stand, fight, smell, taste, sleep, dream, drink, work, breath, and many others.