Page:The grammar of English grammars.djvu/629

 s of each equivalence; as, "When we are habituated to doing [or to do] any thing wrong, we become blinded by it."--Young Christian, p. 326. "The lyre, or harp, was best adapted to accompanying [or to accompany] their declamations."--Music of Nature, p. 336. "The new beginner should be accustomed to giving [or to give] all the reasons for each part of speech."--Nutting's Gram., p. 88. "Which, from infecting our religion and morals, fell to corrupt [say, to corrupting] our language."--SWIFT: Blair's Rhet., p. 108. Besides these instances of ''sameness in the particle, there are some cases of constructional ambiguity'', the noun and the verb having the same form, and the to not determining which is meant: as, "He was inclined to sleep."--"It must be a bitter experience, to be more accustomed to hate than to love." Here are double doubts for the discriminators: their "sign of the infinitive" fails, or becomes uncertain; because they do not know it from a preposition. Cannot my opponents see in these examples an argument against the distinction which they attempt to draw between to and to? An other argument as good, is also afforded by the fact, that our ancestors often used the participle after to, in the very same texts in which we have since adopted the infinitive in its stead; as, "And if yee wolen resceyue, he is Elie that is to comynge."--Matt., xi, 14. "Ihesu that delyueride us fro wraththe to comynge."--1 Thes., i, 10. These, and seventeen other examples of the same kind, may be seen in Tooke's Diversions of Purley, Vol. ii. pp. 457 and 458.

OBS. 22.--Dr. James P. Wilson, speaking of the English infinitive, says:--"But if the appellation of mode be denied it, it is then a verbal noun. This is indeed its truest character, because its idea ever represents an object of approach. To supplies the defect of a termination characteristic of the infinitive, precedes it, and marks it either as that, towards which the preceding verb is directed;[409] or it signifies act, and shows the word to import an action. When the infinitive is the expression of an immediate action, which it must be, after the verbs, bid, can, dare, do, feel, hear, let, make, may, must, need, see, shall, and will, the preposition TO is omitted."--Essay on Grammar, p. 129. That the truest character of the infinitive is that of a verbal noun, is not to be conceded, in weak abandonment of all the reasons for a contrary opinion, until it can be shown that the action or being expressed by it, must needs assume a substantive character, in order to be "that towards which the preceding verb is directed." But this character is manifestly not supposable of any of those infinitives which, according to the foregoing quotation, must follow other verbs without the intervention of the preposition to: as, "Bid him come;"--"He can walk." And I see no reason to suppose it, where the relation of the infinitive to an other word is not "immediate" but marked by the preposition, as above described. For example: "And he laboured till the going-down of the sun TO deliver him."--Dan., vi, 14. Here deliver is governed by to, and connected by it to the finite verb laboured; but to tell us, it is to be understood substantively rather than actively, is an assumption as false, as it is needless.

OBS. 23.--To deny to the infinitive the appellation of mood, no more makes it a verbal noun, than does the Doctor's solecism about what "ITS IDEA ever represents." "The infinitive therefore," as Horne Tooke observes, "appears plainly to be what the Stoics called it, the very verb itself, pure and uncompounded."--Diversions of Purley, Vol. i, p. 286. Not indeed as including the particle to, or as it stands in the English perfect tense, but as it occurs in the simple root. But I cited Dr. Wilson, as above, not so much with a design of animadverting again on this point, as with reference to the import of the particle to; of which he furnishes a twofold explanation, leaving the reader to take which part he will of the contradiction. He at first conceives it to convey in general the idea of "towards," and to mark the infinitive as a term "towards which" something else "is directed." If this interpretation is the true one, it is plain that to before a verb is no other than the common preposition to; and this idea is confirmed by its ancient usage, and by all that is certainly known of its derivation. But if we take the second solution, and say, "it signifies act," we make it not a preposition, but either a noun or a verb; and then the question arises, Which of these is it? Besides, what sense can there be, in supposing to go to mean ''act go, or to be equivalent to do go''.[410]