those of unity,
duration, and motion, &c., above instanced in, as also power and
thinking, have been thus modified to a great variety of complex ideas,
with names belonging to them.
7. Why some modes have, and others have not, names. The reason
whereof, I suppose, has been this,- That the great concernment of
men being with men one amongst another, the knowledge of men, and
their actions, and the signifying of them to one another, was most
necessary; and therefore they made ideas of actions very nicely
modified, and gave those complex ideas names, that they might the more
easily record and discourse of those things they were daily conversant
in, without long ambages and circumlocutions; and that the things they
were continually to give and receive information about might be the
easier and quicker understood. That this is so, and that men in
framing different complex ideas, and giving them names, have been much
governed by the end of speech in general, (which is a very short and
expedite way of conveying their thoughts one to another), is evident
in the names which in several arts have been found out, and applied to
several complex ideas of modified actions, belonging to their
several trades, for dispatch sake, in their direction or discourses
about them. Which ideas are not generally framed in the minds of men
not conversant about these operations.
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