[§ 448]. The ideas of possession and partition as expressed by genitive forms.—If we take a hundred genitive cases, and observe their construction, we shall find, that, with a vast majority of them, the meaning is reducible to one of two heads; viz., the idea of possession or the idea of partition.
Compared with these two powers all the others are inconsiderable, both in number and importance; and if, as in the Greek and Latin languages, they take up a large space in the grammars, it is from their exceptional character rather than from their normal genitival signification.
Again, if both the ideas of possession and partition may, and in many cases must be, reduced to the more general idea of relation, this is a point of grammatical phraseology by no means affecting the practical and special bearings of the present division.
[§ 449]. The adjectival expression of the idea of possession.—All the world over, a property is a possession; and persons, at least, may be said to be the owners of their attributes. Whatever may be the nature of words like mine and thine, the adjectival character of their Latin equivalents, meus and tuus, is undoubted.
The ideas of partition and possession merge into one another.—A man's spade is the possession of a man; a man's hand is the part of a man. Nevertheless, when a man uses his hand as the instrument of his will, the idea which arises from the fact of its being part of his body is merged in the idea of the possessorship which arises from the feeling of ownership or mastery which is evinced in its subservience and application. Without following the refinements to which the further investigation of these questions would lead us, it is sufficient to suggest that the preponderance of the two allied ideas of partition and possession is often determined by the
personality or the non-personality of the subject, and that, when the subject is a person, the idea is chiefly possessive; when a thing, partitive—caput fluvii=the head, which is a part, of a river; caput Toli=the head, which is the possession, of Tolus.
But as persons may be degraded to the rank of things, and as things may, by personification, be elevated to the level of persons, this distinction, although real, may become apparently invalid. In phrases like a tributary to the Tiber—the criminal lost his eye—this field belongs to that parish—the ideas of possessorship and partition, as allied ideas subordinate to the idea of relationship in general, verify the interchange.
[§ 450]. These observations should bring us to the fact that there are two ideas which, more than any other, determine the evolution of a genitive case—the idea of partition and the idea of possession; and that genitive cases are likely to be evolved just in proportion as there is a necessity for the expression of these two ideas.—Let this be applied to the question of the à priori probability of the evolution of a genitive case to the pronouns of the first and second persons of the singular number.
[§ 451]. The idea of possession, and its likelihood of determining the evolution of a genitive form to the pronouns of the first and second person singular. —It is less likely to do so with such pronouns than with other words, inasmuch as it is less necessary. It has been before observed, that the practice of most languages shows a tendency to express the relation by adjectival forms—meus, tuus.
An objection against the conclusiveness of this argument will be mentioned in the sequel.