Verbs are farther distinguished by grammarians into active, passive, and neuter, as being expressive of actions, passions, or neither the one or the other, but mere being or existing, as, _I love_, _am loved_, _live_, _walk_, _or stand_; tho’ according to the signification of words, there does not seem to be any real ground for the latter distinction, for _to love_, _to be loved_, _to live_, _sleep or rest_, must signify either actions, active passions and energies, or their privation and passiveness. So that the distinction in this respect might be more properly made into active and passive only, agreeable to the masculine and feminine, the only proper distinction of nouns as to genders; all actions, substances, and things, at least, as having relation to mankind, being either masculine or feminine, and the distinctions made by the Greeks and Romans being mostly arbitrary and contrary to the meaning of words which ought to determine the genders of nouns. Verbs have a designation of person, corresponding with the personal pronouns; of number with the singular and plural of nouns, of tenses as representing present, past, and future actions and things; and of modes or the manner in which they ought to be expressed. But whatever necessity there may be for a great variety of modes and tenses in dialects, constructed upon arbitrary principles, it does not appear that any more than one is needful for a natural language, or that the modes of conjugating verbs or any other, are in fact expressible by human speech any otherwise than by the whole form or order of inflection and things. And tho’ present, past, and future, seem to be necessary expressions, according to our present mode of conception, yet they are not in reality any representation of time, but of our manner of dividing or reckoning the changes of motions or number of actions in extension, which in the eternal state of spirits, or perhaps in a vacuum, might be deemed as one intire action or the present tense.