ideas: for then they would be perfectly insignificant sounds; but they
relate to positive ideas, and signify their absence.

5 .Words ultimately derived from such as signify sensible ideas

It may also lead us a little towards the original of all our notions
and knowledge, if we remark how great a dependence our words have on
common sensible ideas; and how those which are made use of to stand
for actions and notions quite removed from sense, have their rise from
thence, and from obvious sensible ideas are transferred to more
abstruse significations, and made to stand for ideas that come not
under the cognizance of our senses; v.

g.

to imagine, apprehend,
comprehend, adhere, conceive, instil, disgust, disturbance,
tranquillity, &c.

, are all words taken from the operations of sensible
things, and applied to certain modes of thinking.

Spirit, in its
primary signification, is breath; angel, a messenger: and I doubt
not but, if we could trace them to their sources, we should find, in
all languages, the names which stand for things that fall not under
our senses to have had their first rise from sensible ideas.

By
which we may give some kind of guess what kind of notions they were,
and whence derived, which filled their minds who were the first
beginners of languages, and how nature, even in the naming of
things, unawares suggested to men the originals and principles of
all their knowledge: whilst, to give names that might make known to
others any operations they felt in themselves, or any other ideas that
came not under their senses, they were fain to borrow words from
ordinary known ideas of sensation, by that means to make others the
more easily to conceive those operations they experimented in
themselves, which made no outward sensible appearances; and then, when
they had got known and agreed names to signify those internal
operations of their own minds, they were sufficiently furnished to
make known by words all their other ideas; since they could consist of
nothing but either of outward sensible perceptions, or of the inward
operations of their minds about them; we having, as has been proved,
no ideas at all, but what originally come either from sensible objects
without, or what we feel within ourselves, from the inward workings of
our own spirits, of which we are conscious to ourselves within.

6 .Distribution of subjects to be treated of

But to understand
better the use and force of Language, as subservient to instruction
and knowledge, it will be convenient to consider:
First, To what it is that names, in the use of language, are
immediately applied.

Secondly, Since all (except proper) names are general, and so
stand not particularly for this or that single thing, but for sorts
and ranks of things, it will be necessary to consider, in the next
place, what the sorts and kinds, or, if you rather like the Latin
names, what the Species and Genera of things are, wherein they
consist, and how they come to be made.

These being (as they ought)
well looked into, we shall the better come to find the right use of
words; the natural advantages and defects of language; and the
remedies that ought to be used, to avoid the inconveniences of
obscurity or uncertainty in the signification of words: without
which it is impossible to discourse with any clearness or order
concerning knowledge: which, being conversant about propositions,
and those most commonly universal ones, has greater connexion with
words than perhaps is suspected.

These considerations, therefore, shall be the matter of the
following chapters.

Chapter II
Of the Signification of Words

1.Words are sensible signs, necessary for communication of ideas

Man, though he have great variety of thoughts, and such from which
others as well as himself might receive profit and delight; yet they
are all within his own breast, invisible and hidden from others, nor
can of themselves be made to appear.

The comfort and advantage of
society not being to be had without communication of thoughts, it
was necessary that man should find out some external sensible signs,
whereof those invisible ideas, which his thoughts are made up of,
might be made known to others.

For this purpose nothing was so fit,
either for plenty or quickness, as those articulate sounds, which with
so much ease and variety he found himself able to make.

Thus we may
conceive how words, which were by nature so well adapted to that
purpose, came to be made use of by men as the signs of their ideas;
not by any natural connexion that there is between particular
articulate sounds and certain ideas, for then there would be but one
language amongst all men; but by a voluntary imposition, whereby
such a word is made arbitrarily the mark of such an idea.

The use,
then, of words, is to be sensible marks of ideas; and the ideas they
stand for are their proper and immediate signification.

2 .Words, in their immediate signification, are the sensible signs
of his ideas who uses them

The use men have of these marks being
either to record their own thoughts, for the assistance of their own
memory or, as it were, to bring out their ideas, and lay them before
the view of others: words, in their primary or immediate
signification, stand for nothing but the ideas in the mind of him that
uses them, how imperfectly soever or carelessly those ideas are
collected from the things which they are supposed to represent.

When a
man speaks to another, it is that he may be understood: and the end of
speech is, that those sounds, as marks, may make known his ideas to
the hearer.

That then which words are the marks of are the ideas of
the speaker: nor can any one apply them as marks, immediately, to
anything else but the ideas that he himself hath: for this would be to
make them signs of his own conceptions, and yet apply them to other
ideas; which would be to make them signs and not signs of his ideas at
the same time, and so in effect to have no signification at all.

Words
being voluntary signs, they cannot be voluntary signs imposed by him
on things he knows not.

That would be to make them signs of nothing,
sounds without signification.

A man cannot make his words the signs
either of qualities in things, or of conceptions in the mind of
another, whereof he has none in his own.

Till he has some ideas of his
own, he cannot suppose them to correspond with the conceptions of
another man; nor can he use any signs for them of another man; nor can
he use any signs for them: for thus they would be the signs of he
knows not what, which is in truth to be the signs of nothing.

But when
he represents to himself other men's ideas by some of his own, if he
consent to give them the same names that other men do, it is still
to his own ideas; to ideas that he has, and not to ideas that he has
not.

3 .Examples of this

This is so necessary in the use of language,
that in this respect the knowing and the ignorant, the learned and the
unlearned, use the words they speak (with any meaning) all alike.

They, in every man's mouth, stand for the ideas he has, and which he
would express by them.

A child having taken notice of nothing in the
metal he hears called gold, but the bright shining yellow colour, he
applies the word gold only to his own idea of that colour, and nothing
else; and therefore calls the same colour in a peacock's tail gold.

Another that hath better observed, adds to shining yellow great
weight: and then the sound gold, when he uses it, stands for a complex
idea of a shining yellow and a very weighty substance.

Another adds to
those qualities fusibility: and then the word gold signifies to him
a body, bright, yellow, fusible, and very heavy.

Another adds
malleability.

Each of these uses equally the word gold, when they have
occasion to express the idea which they have applied it to: but it
is evident that each can apply it only to his own idea; nor can he
make it stand as a sign of such a complex idea as he has not.

4 .Words are often secretly referred first to the ideas supposed
to be in other men's minds

But though words, as they are used by men,
can properly and immediately signify nothing but the ideas that are in
the mind of the speaker; yet they in their thoughts give them a secret
reference to two other things.

First, They suppose their words to be marks of the ideas in the
minds also of other men, with whom they communicate: for else they
should talk in vain, and could not be understood, if the sounds they
applied to one idea were such as by the hearer were applied to
another, which is to speak two languages.

But in this men stand not
usually to examine, whether the idea they, and those they discourse
with have in their minds be the same: but think it enough that they
use the word, as they imagine, in the common acceptation of that
language; in which they suppose that the idea they make it a sign of
is precisely the same to which the understanding men of that country
apply that name.

5 .To the reality of things

Secondly, Because men would not be
thought to talk barely of their own imagination, but of things as
really they are; therefore they often suppose the words to stand
also for the reality of things.

But this relating more particularly to
substances and their names, as perhaps the former does to simple ideas
and modes, we shall speak of these two different ways of applying
words more at large, when we come to treat of the names of mixed modes
and substances in particular: though give me leave here to say, that
it is a perverting the use of words, and brings unavoidable
obscurity and confusion into whenever we make them stand for