4. _Of class._--The demonstrative pronouns become _a._ Personal pronouns. _b._ Relative pronouns. _c._ Articles. The reflective pronoun often becomes reciprocal. {381} These statements are made for the sake of illustrating, not of exhausting, the subject. It follows, however, as an inference from them, that the classification of pronouns is complicated. Even if we knew the original power and derivation of every form of every pronoun in a language, it would be far from an easy matter to determine therefrom the paradigm that they should take in grammar. To place a word according to its power in a late stage of language might confuse the study of an early stage. To say that because a word was once in a given class, it should always be so, would be to deny that in the present English _they_, _these_, and _she_ are personal pronouns at all. The two tests, then, of the grammatical place of a pronoun, its _present power_ and its _original power_, are often conflicting. In the English language the point of most importance in this department of grammar is the place of forms like _mine_ and _thine_; in other words, of the forms in _-n_. Are they genitive cases of a personal pronoun, as _mei_ and _tui_ are supposed to be in Latin, or are they possessive pronouns like _meus_ and _tuus_? Now, if we take up the common grammars of the English language _as it is_, we find, that, whilst _my_ and _thy_ are dealt with as genitive cases, _mine_ and _thine_ are considered adjectives. In the Anglo-Saxon grammars, however, _min_ and _thin_, the older forms of _mine_ and _thine_, are treated as genitives; of which _my_ and _thy_ have been dealt with as abbreviated forms, and that by respectable scholars. Now, to prove from the syntax of the older English that in many cases the two forms were convertible, and to answer that the words in question are _either_ genitive cases or adjectives, is lax philology; since the real question is, _which of the two is the primary, and which the secondary meaning?_ s. 447. The _[`a] priori_ view of the likelihood of words like _mine_ and _thine_ being genitive cases, must be determined by the comparison of three series of facts. 1. The ideas expressed by the genitive case, with particular reference to the two preponderating notions of possession and partition. {382} 2. The circumstance of the particular notion of possession being, in the case of the personal pronouns of the two first persons singular, generally expressed by a form undoubtedly adjectival. 3. The extent to which the idea of partition becomes merged in that of possession, and _vice vers[^a]_. s. 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.