Many of the words quoted are purely reflexive, others passive or deponent. Such words as óttask, œðrask, dásk, iðrask, reiðask are deponent, though they originally may have been reflexive, but the active gender is here quite obsolete.

humankind's yen for knowledge

We live our lives in three dimensions for our threescore and ten allotted years. Yet every branch of contemporary science, from statistics to cosmology, alludes to processes that operate on scales outside of human experience: the millisecond and the nanometer, the eon and the light-year.

A few years later Sir Thomas More staged a fictional debate in his Utopia between the author, Cardinal Morton, the explorer Raphael, and a lawyer, in which all applied the concept of the weal public to assess English society.