cted 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: 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 t