se use of their
words serves them well enough in their ordinary discourses or affairs.
But this is not sufficient for philosophical inquiries. Knowledge and
reasoning require precise determinate ideas. And though men will not
be so importunately dull as not to understand what others say, without
demanding an explication of their terms; nor so troublesomely critical
as to correct others in the use of the words they receive from them:
yet, where truth and knowledge are concerned in the case, I know not
what fault it can be, to desire the explication of words whose sense
seems dubious; or why a man should be ashamed to own his ignorance in
what sense another man uses his words; since he has no other way of
certainly knowing it but by being informed. This abuse of taking words
upon trust has nowhere spread so far, nor with so ill effects, as
amongst men of letters. The multiplication and obstinacy of disputes,
which have so laid waste the intellectual world, is owing to nothing
more than to this ill use of words. For though it be generally believed
that there is great diversity of opinions in the volumes and variety of
controversies the world is distracted with; yet the most I can find that
the contending learned men of different parties do, in their arguings
one with another, is, that they speak different languages. For I am apt
to imagine, that when any of them, quitting terms, think upon things,
and know what they think, they think all the same: though perhaps what
they would have be different.

23. The Ends of Language: First, To convey our Ideas.

To conclude this consideration of the imperfection and abuse of
language. The ends of language in our discourse with others being
chiefly these three: First, to make known one man's thoughts or ideas to
another; Secondly, to do so with as much ease and quickness as possible;
and, Thirdly, thereby to convey the knowledge of things: language is
either abused or deficient, when it fails of any of these three.

First, Words fail in the first of these ends, and lay not open one man's
ideas to another's view: 1. When men have names in their mouths without
any determinate ideas in their minds whereof they are the signs: or, 2.
When they apply the common received names of any language to ideas, to
which the common use of that language does not apply them: or 3. When
they apply them very unsteadily, making them stand now for one, and by
and by for another idea.

24. Secondly,