4. They are all marks of some action or intimation of the mind.
Neither is it enough, for the explaining of these words, to render
them, as is usual in dictionaries, by words of another tongue which
come nearest to their signification: for what is meant by them is
commonly as hard to be understood in one as another language. They are
all marks of some action or intimation of the mind; and therefore to
understand them rightly, the several views, postures, stands, turns,
limitations, and exceptions, and several other thoughts of the mind,
for which we have either none or very deficient names, are
diligently to be studied. Of these there is a great variety, much
exceeding the number of particles that most languages have to
express them by: and therefore it is not to be wondered that most of
these particles have divers and sometimes almost opposite
significations. In the Hebrew tongue there is a particle consisting of
but one single letter, of which there are reckoned up, as I
remember, seventy, I am sure above fifty, several significations.
5. Instance in "but." "But" is a particle, none more familiar in our
language: and he that says it is a discretive conjunction, and that it
answers to sed Latin, or mais in French, thinks he has sufficiently
explained it. But yet it seems to me to intimate several relations the
mind gives to the several propositions or parts of them which it joins
by this monosyllable.
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