In fact, the Indo-European verb is, by origin, an adjective (or substantive) modified by a pronoun: _Bharâmi_ = carrier-me, I carry. It is to be regretted that we cannot follow the details of this marvellous construction,—the result of unconscious and collective labor that has made of the verb a supple instrument, suited for all expressions, by the invention of moods, voices, and tenses. We may note that, as regards tenses, the distinction between the three parts of duration (which seems to us so simple) appears to have been established very slowly. Doubtless it can be asserted that it existed, actually, in the mind of primitive man, but that the imperfection of his verbal instrument failed in translating it. However this may be, it is a moot point whether the verb, at the outset, expressed past or present. It seems at first to have translated a vague conception of duration, of continuity in action; it was at first “durative,” a past which still continues, a past-present. The adjective notion contained in the verb, indefinitely as to time, only became precise by little and little. The distinction between the moments of duration did not occur by the same process in all languages, and in some, highly developed, otherwise like the Semitic languages, it remained very imperfect.[62] The main point was to show how the adjective-substantive, modified by the adjunction of pronominal elements, constituted another linguistic organ, and losing its original mark little by little, became the verb with its multiple functions. The qualificatory character fundamental to it makes of it an instrument proper to express all degrees of abstraction and generalisation from the highest to the lowest, to run up the scale of lower, medium, and higher abstractions. Ex., to drink, eat, sleep, strike;—higher, to love, pray, instruct, etc.; higher still, to act, exist, etc. The supreme degree of abstraction, i. e., the moment at which the verb is most empty of all concrete sense, is found in the auxiliaries of the modern analytical languages. These, says Max Müller, occupy the same place among the verbs, as abstract nouns among the substantives. They date from a later epoch, and all had originally a more material and more expressive character. Our auxiliary verbs had to traverse a long series of vicissitudes, before they reached the desiccated, lifeless form that makes them so appropriate to the demands of our abstract prose. _Habere_, which is now employed in all Roman languages to express simply a past time, at first signified “to hold fast,” “to retain.”