And yet who can wonder that all the
sciences and parts of knowledge have been so overcharged with
obscure and equivocal terms, and insignificant and doubtful
expressions, capable to make the most attentive or quick-sighted
very little, or not at all, the more knowing or orthodox: since
subtlety, in those who make profession to teach or defend truth,
hath passed so much for a virtue: a virtue, indeed, which,
consisting for the most part in nothing but the fallacious and
illusory use of obscure or deceitful terms, is only fit to make men
more conceited in their ignorance, and more obstinate in their errors.
6. Addicted to wrangling about sounds. Let us look into the books of
controversy of any kind, there we shall see that the effect of
obscure, unsteady, or equivocal terms is nothing but noise and
wrangling about sounds, without convincing or bettering a man's
understanding. For if the idea be not agreed on, betwixt the speaker
and hearer, for which the words stand, the argument is not about
things, but names. As often as such a word whose signification is
not ascertained betwixt them, comes in use, their understandings
have no other object wherein they agree, but barely the sound; the
things that they think on at that time, as expressed by that word,
being quite different.
7. Instance, bat and bird.
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