THE ACTIVE INFINITIVE. 
63 
derfon, ‘ undertake ’). With several ( tcecan , ‘ teach/ tihhian , ‘direct;’ pos¬ 
sibly, also: murnan, ‘lament;’ sierwan, ‘plot;’ smeagan, ‘consider’), the 
infinitive may be considered adverbial (consecutive) rather than objective. 
Several ( anforlcetan , ‘ abandon; ’ forsacan, ‘ refuse; ’ forseon, ‘ despise; ’ ieldan, 
‘ delay; ’ lofian, ‘ allow; ’ onscunian, ‘ shun ’) have the inflected infinitive 
when we should expect the uninflected; but ieldan may follow the analogy of 
other verbs of delaying, like elcian; while lofian in the passage in question is 
datival in sense. 
(6) With a verb not found with a case ( gedyrstlcecan , ‘ presume,’ ‘ dare ’), 
with which the infinitive appears to us as an accusative objective; and mynnan , 
‘ direct one’s course to,’ ‘ intend,’ with which the infinitive wavers in sense 
between the direct and the indirect object. 
In a word, while the inflected infinitive only is found with a few verbs that 
govern the accusative only, this happens chiefly with compounds whose simplex 
govern a dative or a genitive; in the main, the inflected infinitive is found with 
verbs that govern an object in the genitive or in the dative (occasionally in the 
instrumental), or in both; or with verbs that are followed by a preposition 
plus an oblique case; and, while occasionally, even after verbs governing the 
genitive or the dative (or both), to the modem mind the infinitive appears as 
if it were an accusative objective, the same thing would be true of the noun in 
the genitive or the dative with these verbs. Taken as a whole, the infinitive 
in this group of verbs normally is a genitive or a dative (occasionally an in¬ 
strumental) object to the chief verb, though occasionally the objective idea 
so pales away that the infinitive may be considered adverbial in the narrower 
sense, and be regarded as consecutive or final. 
In group III, verbs having as object the Uninflected Infinitive and the 
Inflected Infinitive each, we note: — 
1 . In the majority of examples, * 1 the double construction, with uninflected 
and inflected infinitive, occurs with verbs having a double (occasionally a 
triple) regimen, that is, with verbs governing (1) two cases at once 2 or (2) any 
one of two or three cases (or that govern a case or are followed by a preposi¬ 
tional phrase); and the distinction between the uninflected infinitive and the 
inflected infinitive is in the large such as we find with the different cases (geni¬ 
tive, dative, instrumental, and accusative) with these verbs, though with not 
a few exceptions duly pointed out in the several groups. The objective infini¬ 
tive is both uninflected and inflected: — 
(a) With a few verbs governing the accusative of the direct and the dative 
of the indirect object ( aliefan , ‘ allow; ’ secan , ‘ seek; ’ sellan, ‘ grant,’ ‘ allow ’). 
The double construction with these verbs is due in part, no doubt, to their 
double regimen, but the inflected infinitive does not appear to us as an indirect 
object. With aliefan we have found the double construction with the sub¬ 
jective infinitive, due partly to its double regimen, partly to the datival sense 
thereof; and, as a rule, the subjective infinitive is inflected when near aliefan , 
but uninflected when remote therefrom. So here with the objective infinitive: 
the uninflected infinitive {Mat. 8.21 b ) is the second in a series of two, the first 
of which is inflected and is near to, but not juxtaposed with, the chief verb. 
1 If we except onginnan, an apparent rather than a real exception, as is shown below, 
i (i) = ** double regimen ” in the looser sense; (2) = “ double regimen in the narrower sense. 
