subjunctiveness

The first suggestion resulting is the obvious and simple but profitable one that nothing is achieved by schools unless some connection is influenced, that we cannot assume change in any pupil unless bonds have been made or broken so as to cause him to respond as he did not before. The connection may be one leading only to an attitude, say of interest or enjoyment. […] It may lead from some elusive element or feature of a situation, such as the “place-value” of a number or the subjunctiveness of a subjunctive, to some general element or feature of many responses, such as open-mindedness, or cheerfulness, or readiness to do what one accepts as right.

1914 July 4–11, Edward L[ee] Thorndike, “The Foundations of Educational Achievement”, in National Education Association of the United States, Journal of Proceedings and Addresses of the Fifty-Second Annual Meeting […], Ann Arbor, Mich.: […] [T]he Association […], →ISSN, →OCLC, page 200

The evasion of the responsibility of omniscient understanding, I said, first became crucial in the novels of Henry James; that novelist in the important autumnal part of his colossal lifework situating himself always at a remove or two from his dramatis personae, mostly just overhearing them as they gossip with and about one another, in indefatigable supposition and subjunctiveness, in a guessing game.

1962, Glenway Wescott, “Talks with Thornton Wilder”, in Images of Truth: Remembrances and Criticism, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Row, →ISBN, →LCCN, pages 268–269