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 colle