We laugh at people who still believe in ghosts and witches, but a belief in infinitives and supines is not only tolerated, but inculcated in our best schools and universities. Now, what do we really mean if we speak of an infinitive? It is a time-honored name, no doubt, handed down to us from the Middle Ages; it has its distant roots in Rome, Alexandria, and Athens;--but has it any real kernel? Has it any more body or substance than such names as Satyrs and Lamias? Let us look at the history of the name before we look at the mischief which it, like many other names, has caused by making people believe that whenever there is a name there must be something behind it. The name was invented by Greek philosophers who, in their first attempts at classifying and giving names to the various forms of language, did not know whether to class such forms as γράφειν, γράψειν, γράψαι, γεγραφέναι, γράφεσθαι, γράψεσθαι, γέγραφθαι, γράψασθαι, γραφθῆναι, γραφθήσεσθαι, as nouns or as verbs. They had established for their own satisfaction the broad distinction between nouns (ὀνόματα) and verbs (ῥήματα); they had assigned to each a definition, but, after having done so, they found that forms like γράφειν would not fit their definition either of noun or verb.[19] What could they do? Some (the Stoics) represented the forms in ειν, etc., as a subdivision of the verb, and introduced for them the name ῥῆμα ἀπαρέμφατον or γενικώτατον. Others recognized them as a separate part of speech, raising their number from eight to nine or ten. Others, again, classed them under the adverb (ἐπιῤῥημα), as one of the eight recognized parts of speech. The Stoics, taking their stand on Aristotle’s definition of ῥῆμα, could not but regard the infinitive as ῥῆμα, because it implied time, past, present, or future, which was with them recognized as the specific characteristic of the verb (_Zeitwort_). But they went further, and called forms such as γράφειν, etc., ῥῆμα, in the highest or most general sense, distinguishing other verbal forms, such as γράφει, etc., by the names of κατηγόρημα or σύμβαμα. Afterwards, in the progress of grammatical science, the definition of ῥῆμα became more explicit and complete. It was pointed out that a verb, besides its predicative meaning (ἔμφασις), is able to[20] express several additional meanings (παρακολουθήματα or παρεμφάσεις), viz.: not only time, as already pointed out by Aristotle, but also person and number. The two latter meanings, however, being absent in γράφειν, this was now called ῥῆμα ἀπαρέμφατον (without by-meanings), or γενικώτατον, and, for practical purposes, this ῥῆμα ἀπαρέμφατον soon became the prototype of conjugation.