The personal pronouns and such of the possessives and relatives as will not join with substantives in construction, are substantives, and the rest are adjectives; and pronouns like other English nouns, have no variation or declension of person, number, gender, or case, but each is an original, distinct name. So that to attempt any further distinction of pronouns, like all other unnecessary distinctions, would tend to the confusion, rather than the illustration of language, and they perhaps might be better distinguished by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or their original signification of 1st, 2d, 3d, persons singular and plural; tho’ such names as have no foundation in nature, may require more arbitrary rules towards their explanation.
Adjective and participle nouns are _added_ to substantives and propositions, as expressive of the attributes or qualities, affections, and accidents of things, as in the following example; The _preying_ beast was _daring_; the astonished guese are _fled_, _lost_, or _stolen_; and he is still _pursuing_ a fled, lost, or stolen gus, in order to make a _sweet_ morsel of its garbage; but all such sensations are _nauseous_ to human nature. But qualities were originally expressed by the verbal actives, with few particles, and the compounded sorts were adjected thereto.
And qualities being the effects of light, heat, and motion, flowing upon, warming or penetrating bodies differently modified in various degrees, and the sensations thence produced in us, as those of colours, tastes, sounds and feeling, rather than any internal offences or properties of matter or substances, adjectives assert or express their subsistence as the attributes of various substances and things, as the following specimen of English adjectives shews.
There are no adjectives terminating in b except _ib_, which signifies life to beings, as in glib _liquid_, and bib to _drink_; for ab, eb, ob, ub, signifying from or out of life, would be improper to express life to things, as descending upon, and penetrating them, so as to give them motion, growth, generation, and sensation. Nor is there any adjective terminating in the letter p, it being expressive only of the parts of matter, as divisor of a, e, o, and t.