Note 122 — DISSERTATION IV. (continued 2)

A passage in Dr. Middleton's Life of Cicero, is remarkably accurate; "The celebrated orator, L. Cassius, died of the same disease (the pleurisy,) which might probably be then, as I was told in Rome it is now, the peculiar distemper of the place." Was refers to time completely past; but is declares a fact that exists generally, at all times; the verb is therefore in the present tense, or as Harris terms it,[123] the aorist of the present. So also in Dr. Reid's Essays, vol. 1. p. 18. "Those philosophers held, that there are three first principles of all things;" which is correct English. "Aristotle thought every object of human understanding enters at first by the senses."—Page 110. The following passage is equally correct. "There is a courage depending on nerves and blood, which was improved to the highest pitch among the Greeks."——Gillies, Hist. of Greece, vol. 1. p. 248. This courage is derived from the constitution of the human body; it exists therefore at all times; and had our author said, "there was a courage depending on nerves and blood, which the Greeks improved to the highest pitch," the sense would have been left imperfect. Here then we see the indefinite use of this form of the present tense; for were the verb is, in the foregoing example, limited to time now present, it would make the author write nonsense; it being absurd to say, "the Greeks 2000 years ago improved a courage which exists only at the present time." So that verbs, in the present tense, express facts that have an uninterrupted existence in past, present, and future time.