making “is being built precisely equivalent to is built,” classes the two participles differently, and both erroneously,—­the one as a “present participle,” and the other, of late, as a “past,”—­has also said above, “‘Built,’ is a perfect participle:  and THEREFORE cannot, in any connexion, express an action, or the suffering of an action, now in progress.”  And Dr. Perley, who also calls the compound of being a “present participle,” argues thus:  “Being built signifies an action, finished; and how can Is being built, signify an action unfinished?” To expound a passive term actively, or as “signifying action,” is, at any rate, a near approach to absurdity; and I shall presently show that the fore-cited notion of “a perfect participle,” now half abandoned by Bullions himself, has been the seed of the very worst form of that ridiculous neology which the good Doctor was opposing.

OBS. 11.—­These criticisms being based upon the meaning of certain participles, either alone or in phrases, and the particular terms spoken of being chiefly meant to represent classes, what is said of them may be understood of their kinds.  Hence the appropriate naming of the kinds, so as to convey no false idea of any participle’s import, is justly brought into view; and I may be allowed to say here, that, for the first participle passive, which begins with “being,” the epithet “Imperfect” is better than “Present,” because this compound participle denotes, not always what is present, but always the state of something by which an action is, or was, or will be, undergone or undergoing—­a state continuing, or so regarded, though perhaps the action causative may be ended—­or sometimes perhaps imagined only, and not yet really begun.  With a marvellous instability of doctrine, for the professed systematizer of different languages and grammars, Dr. Bullions has recently changed his names of the second and third participles, in both voices, from “Perfect” and “Compound Perfect,” to “Past” and “Perfect.”  His notion now is, that, “The Perfect participle is always compound; as, Having finished, Having been finished.”—­Bullions’s Analyt. and Pract.  Grammar, 1849, p. 77.  And what was the “Perfect” before, in his several books, is now called the “Past;” though, with this change, he has deliberately made an other which is repugnant to it:  this participle, being the basis of three tenses always, and of all the tenses sometimes, is now allowed by the Doctor to lend the term “perfect” to the three,—­“Present-perfect, Past-perfect, Future-perfect,"—­even when itself is named otherwise!