Note 117 — Chapter IX
Reading edition
“The distinction of active and passive is not essential to verbs. In the infancy of language, it was in all probability not known; in Hebrew, the difference but imperfectly exists, and in the early periods of it, possibly did not exist at all. In Arabic, the only distinction which obtains, arises from the vowel points, a late invention compared with the antiquity of that language. And in our own tongue the names of active and passive would have remained unknown, if they had not been learnt in Latin.” Jones.