So likewise, “almost all philologists who have paid attention to the Polynesian languages, concur in observing that the divisions of parts of speech received by European grammarians are, as far as external form is concerned, inapplicable, or nearly so, to this particular class. The same element is admitted to be indifferently substantive, adjective, verb, or particle.”[257] “I will eat the rice,” would require to be rendered, “The-eating-of-me-the-rice = My eating will be of the rice.” “The supposed verb is, in fact, an abstract noun, including in it the notion of futurity of time in construction with an oblique pronominal suffix; and the ostensible object of the action is not a regimen in the accusative case, but an apposition. It is scarcely necessary to say how irreconcilable this is with the ordinary grammatical definition of a transitive verb; and that, too, in a construction where we should expect that true verbs would be infallibly employed, if any existed in the language.”[258] And, not to overburden the argument with illustrations, it will be enough to add with this writer, “there can be no question that nouns in conjunction with oblique cases of pronouns may be, and, in fact, are employed as verbs. Some of the constructions above specified admit of no other analysis; and they are no accidental partial phenomena, but capable of being produced by thousands.”[259] * * * * * It would be easy to multiply quotations from other authorities to the same effect; but these, I think, are enough to show how completely the philology of predication destroys the philosophy of predication, as this has been presented by my opponents. Not only, as already shown, have they been misled by the verbal accident of certain languages with which they happen to be familiar identifying the copula with the verb “to be” (which itself, as we have also seen, has no existence in many languages); but, as we now see, their analysis is equally at fault where it deals with the subject and predicate. Such a fully elaborated form of proposition as “A negro is black,” far from presenting “the simplest element of thought,” is the demonstrable outcome of an enormously prolonged course of mental evolution; and I do not know a more melancholy instance of ingenuity misapplied than is furnished by the arguments previously quoted from such writers, who, ignoring all that we now know touching the history of predication, seek to show that an act of predication is at once “the simplest element of thought,” and so hugely elaborate a process as they endeavour to represent. The futility of such an argument may be compared with that of a morphologist who should be foolish enough to represent that the Vertebrata can never have descended from the Protozoa, and maintain his thesis by ignoring all the intermediate animals which are known actually to exist.