Irresistably it came to me again that beauty, far from being wasted, was purposive, that this purpose was of a redeeming kind, and that some one who was pleased co-operated with it for my personal benefit.

As we saw in our discussion of the FAKE GUN example in chapter 19, there are natural dimensions to our categories for objects: […] purposive, based on the uses we can make of an object in a given situation.

Other ecclesiastics … were similarly accepting of a space for purposive and beneficent human action and betterment in a disenchanted world.

The question at once arises whether medieval thinkers really believed that what we now call inanimate objects were sentient and purposive.

The world was generally agreed to be a purposive one, responsive to the wishes of its Creator […].

Whenever she opened a scientific book and saw whole paragraphs of incomprehensible words and symbols, she felt a sense of wonder at the great territories of learning that lay beyond her—the sum of so many noble and purposive attempts to make objective sense of the world.

Many scholars suggest that […] the increase in the use of the to-infinitive in Middle English took place at the expense of the bare infinitive (i.e. an infinitive without the marker to). […] due to the loss of verbal inflections, it became difficult to distinguish the infinitival form from other verbal forms. As a result […] to began to function as a mere marker of the infinitive, losing its original ‘purposive’ sense […]

Purposive

Meaning

Adj

Origin

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