25. Therewith to convey the knowledge of things. Thirdly, There is
no knowledge of things conveyed by men's words, when their ideas agree
not to the reality of things. Though it be a defect that has its
original in our ideas, which are not so conformable to the nature of
things as attention, study, and application might make them, yet it
fails not to extend itself to our words too, when we use them as signs
of real beings, which yet never had any reality or existence.
26. How men's words fail in all these: First, when used without
any ideas. First, He that hath words of any language, without distinct
ideas in his mind to which he applies them, does, so far as he uses
them in discourse, only make a noise without any sense or
signification; and how learned soever he may seem, by the use of
hard words or learned terms, is not much more advanced thereby in
knowledge, than he would be in learning, who had nothing in his
study but the bare titles of books, without possessing the contents of
them. For all such words, however put into discourse, according to the
right construction of grammatical rules, or the harmony of well-turned
periods, do yet amount to nothing but bare sounds, and nothing else.
27. When complex ideas are without names annexed to them.
Secondly, He that has complex ideas, without particular names for
them, would be in no better case than a bookseller, who had in his
warehouse volumes that lay there unbound, and without titles, which he
could therefore make known to others only by showing the loose sheets,
and communicate them only by tale.
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