The article presents the cognitive analysis of the dative case in Russian. The purpose of the article is to show the dative pattern. Basing her observations on the key role of spatial images in historical forming of sentence semantic structure, the author reveals the semantic core of the dative case. This semantic core uniting all dative sentences is not objectively a general or a basic meaning. It is an abstract spatial image, which is a component of the coherent internal (central) or external (peripherical) syntax space. The paper demonstrates that various contextual meanings of the dative go back to the only primitive spatial image schema. The principal methods are introspection and component analysis. The paper contributes to the research of spatial relations and the types of conceptualisation of motion in language. The theory presented here might be useful in the cognitive grammar courses, educational linguistics etc. The paper helps in understanding the case phenomenon.