no one of the five perceives it!  And, besides, no one of them says any thing about the government of this infinitive, except Ingersoll, and he supplies a verb. “Than and as,” says Greenleaf, “sometimes appear to govern the infinitive mood; as, ‘Nothing makes a man suspect much more, than to know little;’ ’An object so high as to be invisible.”—­Gram.  Simp., p. 38.  Here is an other fictitious and ambiguous example, in which the phrase, “to know little,” is the subject of makes understood.  Nixon supposes the infinitive phrase after as to be always the subject of a finite verb understood after it; as, “An object so high as to be invisible is or, implies.”  See English Parser, p. 100.

[416] Dr. Crombie, after copying the substance of Campbell’s second Canon, that, “In doubtful cases analogy should be regarded,” remarks:  “For the same reason, ‘it needs’ and ‘he dares,’ are better than ‘he need’ and ‘he dare.’”—­On Etym. and Synt., p. 326.  Dr. Campbell’s language is somewhat stronger:  “In the verbs to dare and to need, many say, in the third person present singular, dare and need, as ’he need not go:  he dare not do it.’  Others say, dares and needs.  As the first usage is exceedingly irregular, hardly any thing less than uniform practice could authorize it.”—­Philosophy of Rhet., p. 175. Dare for dares I suppose to be wrong; but if need is an auxiliary of the potential mood, to use it without inflection, is neither “irregular,” nor at all inconsistent with the foregoing canon.  But the former critic notices these verbs a second time, thus:  “‘He dare not,’ ‘he need not,’ may be justly pronounced solecisms, for ‘he dares,’ ‘he needs.’”—­Crombie, on Etym. and Synt., p. 378.  He also says, “The verbs bid, dare, need, make, see, hear, feel, let, are not followed by the sign of the infinitive.”—­Ib., p. 277.  And yet he writes thus:  “These are truths, of which, I am persuaded, the author, to whom I allude, needs not to be reminded.”—­Ib., p. 123.  So Dr. Bullions declares against need in the singular, by putting down the following example as bad English:  “He need not be in so much haste.”—­Bullions’s E. Gram., p. 134.  Yet he himself writes thus:  “A name more appropriate than the term neuter, need not be desired.”—­Ib., p. 196.  A school-boy may see the inconsistency of this.

[417] Some modern grammarians will have it, that a participle governed by a preposition is a “participial noun;” and yet, when they come to parse an adverb or an objective following, their “noun” becomes a “participle” again, and not a “noun.”  To allow words thus to dodge from one class to an other, is not only unphilosophical, but ridiculously absurd.  Among those who thus treat this construction of the participle, the chief, I think, are Butler, Hurt, Weld, Wells, and S. S. Greene.