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.
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