“It is a curious fact hitherto overlooked by grammarians and logicians, that the definition of a noun applies strictly only to the nominative case. The oblique cases are really attribute-words, and the inflection is practically nothing but a device for turning a noun into an adjective or adverb. This is perfectly clear as regards the genitive, and, indeed there is historical evidence to show that the genitive in Aryan languages was originally identical with an adjective ending; ‘man’s life’ and ‘human life’ being expressed in the same way. It is also clear that ‘noctem’ in ‘flet noctem’ is a pure adverb of time. It is not so easy to see that the accusative in such sentences as ‘He beats the boy’ is also a sort of adverb, because the connection between verb and object is so intimate as almost to form one simple idea, as in the case of noun-composition. But it is clear that if ‘boy’ in the compound ‘boy-beating’ is an attribute-word, it can very well be so also when ‘beating’ is thrown into the verbal form without any change of meaning.”[240] Lastly, upon this point Professor Max Müller says, while speaking of Aryan adjectives:—“These were not used for the first time when people said ‘The sun is bright,’ but when they predicated the quality of brightness, or the act of shooting out light, and said, as it were, ‘Brightness-here.’ Adjectives, in fact, were formed, at first, exactly like substantives, and many of them could be used in both characters. There are languages in which adjectives are not distinguished from substantives. But though outwardly alike, they are conceived as different from substantives the moment they are used in a sentence for the purpose of predicating or of qualifying a substantive.”[241] So much, then, for substantives and adjectives: it cannot be said that there is any evidence of historical priority of the one over the other; but rather that so soon as the denotative meanings of substantives became fixed, they admitted of having imparted to them the meanings of adjectives, genitives, and predicates, by the simple expedient of apposition—an expedient which, as we have seen in earlier chapters, is rendered inevitable by the laws of association and “the logic of events:” it is an expedient that must have been furnished _to_ the mind, and therefore need never have been intentionally devised _by_ it.