Page:The grammar of English grammars.djvu/623



UNDER NOTE XV.—PERMANENT PROPOSITIONS.

"Cicero maintained that whatsoever was useful was good."—"I observed that love constituted the whole moral character of God."—Dwight. "Thinking that one gained nothing by being a good man."—Voltaire. "I have already told you that I was a gentleman."—Fontaine. "If I should ask, whether ice and water were two distinct species of things."—Locke. "A stranger to the poem would not easily discover that this was verse."—Murray's Gram., 12mo, p. 260. "The doctor affirmed, that fever always produced thirst."—Inst., p. 192. "The ancients asserted, that virtue was its own reward."—Ib. "They should not have repeated the error, of insisting that the infinitive was a mere noun."—Diversions of Purley, Vol. i, p. 288.

"It was observed in Chap. III. that the distinctive or had a double use."—Churchill's Gram., p. 154. "Two young gentlemen, who have made a discovery that there was no God."—Swift.

RULE XVIII.—INFINITIVES.

The Infinitive Mood is governed in general by the preposition TO, which commonly connects it to a finite verb: as, "I desire TO learn."—Dr. Adam. "Of me the Roman people have many pledges, which I must strive, with my utmost endeavours, TO preserve, TO defend, TO confirm, and TO redeem."—Duncan's Cicero, p. 41.

"What if the foot, ordain'd the dust TO tread, Or hand TO toil, aspir'd TO be the head?"—Pope.

OBSERVATIONS ON RULE XVIII.

OBS. 1.—No word is more variously explained by grammarians, than this word TO, which is put before the verb in the infinitive mood. Johnson, Walker, Scott, Todd, and some other lexicographers, call it an adverb; but, in explaining its use, they say it denotes certain relations, which it is not the office of an adverb to express. (See the word in Johnson's Quarto Dictionary.) D. St. Quentin, in his Rudiments of General Grammar, says, "To, before a verb, is an adverb;" and yet his "Adverbs are words that are joined to verbs or adjectives, and express some circumstance or quality." See pp. 33 and 39. Lowth, Priestley, Fisher, L. Murray, Webster, Wilson, S. W. Clark, Coar, Comly, Blair, Felch, Fisk, Greenleaf, Hart, Weld, Webber, and others, call it a preposition; and some of these ascribe to it the government of the verb, while others do not. Lowth says, "The preposition TO, placed before the verb, makes the infinitive mood."—Short Gram., p. 42. "Now this," says Horne Tooke, "is manifestly not so: for TO placed before the verb loveth, will not make the infinitive mood. He would have said more truly, that TO placed before some nouns, makes verbs."—Diversions of Purley, Vol. i, p. 287.

OBS. 2.—Skinner, in his Canones Etymologici, calls this TO "an equivocal article,"—Tooke, ib., i, 288. Nutting, a late American grammarian, says: "The sign TO is no other than the Greek article to; as, to agapan [, to love]; or, as some say, it is the Saxon do"—Practical Gram., p. 66. Thus, by suggesting two false and inconsistent derivations, though he uses not the name equivocal article, he first makes the word an article, and then equivocal—equivocal in etymology, and of course in meaning.[403] Nixon, in his English Parser, supposes it to be, unequivocally, the Greek article [Greek: to], the. See the work, p. 83. D. Booth says, "To is, by us, applied to Verbs; but it was the neuter Article (the) among the Greeks."—''Introd. to Analyt. Dict.'', p. 60. According to Horne Tooke, "Minshew also distinguishes between the preposition TO, and the sign of the infinitive TO. Of the former he is silent, and of the latter he says: 'To, as to make, to walk, to do, a Græco articulo [Greek: to].' But Dr. Gregory Sharpe is persuaded, that our language has taken it from the Hebrew. And Vossius derives the correspondent Latin preposition AD from the same source."—Diversions of Purley, Vol. i, p. 293.

OBS. 3.—Tooke also says, "I observe, that Junius and Skinner and Johnson, have not chosen