224 On certain Tenses so. In short all knowledge, of whatsoever kind, like every- thing else that is to be stable and lasting, must be founded on faith : and unless we set about our task with a firm per- suasion that some valuable conclusion is to be arrived at, we shall never find out anything worth finding. To call anything an exception therefore is merely in other words to own that we know nothing about it : and with regard to the perfect middle, as well as the second aorist, it can hardly be desirable that any alteration should be made in our grammars to increase the number of exceptions in them, and to make them still more irregular than they are already. It might be possible indeed, even without terming either form of the perfect in a an anomaly or a redundancy, to class them both, as Thiersch has done, under the same head. But at all events it must be admitted that the man- ner in which they are derived from their theme is totally different; and so are their characteristics. One of them ap- pears to have belonged to an earlier stage of the language than the other ; for the theme appears in it under what may not unreasonably be regarded as an older form. In several verbs too we meet with both. So that perhaps the most judicious course is to range them side by side, not as distinct tenses, but as distinct forms of the same tense, to which, from the desynonymizing tendency before spoken of, distinct meanings were in some cases allotted. In like manner too it might be advisable to retain the names of the first and second aorist, the first and second future, in the passive voice, though care should be taken to inculcate that they again are not to be considered as distinct tenses, but as varieties of the same tense. For Buttmann has clearly shewn (Vol. i. p. 450) that the secondary forms in this instance are not independent of the primary, but are merely dialectic modifications of them, which they underwent for the sake of euphony. That the second aorist passive does not come, as it is traced in our grammars, from the second aorist active, he demonstrates by the remarkable fact that TpeiTco is the only verb which had an active and passive second aorist in common use: and even of Tpeirco the second aorist active was almost superseded by the first. So that in reality the second aorist passive is only a softer form of
