By this method one may make demonstrations and undoubted
propositions in words, and yet thereby advance not one jot in the
knowledge of the truth of things: v.g. he that having learnt these
following words, with their ordinary mutual relative acceptations
annexed to them: v.g. substance, man, animal, form, soul,
vegetative, sensitive, rational, may make several undoubted
propositions about the soul, without knowing at all what the soul
really is: and of this sort, a man may find an infinite number of
propositions, reasonings, and conclusions, in books of metaphysics,
school-divinity, and some sort of natural philosophy: and, after
all, know as little of God, spirits, or bodies, as he did before he
set out.
10. And why. He that hath liberty to define, i.e. to determine the
signification of his names of substances (as certainly every one
does in effect, who makes them stand for his own ideas), and makes
their significations at a venture, taking them from his own or other
men's fancies, and not from an examination or inquiry into the
nature of things themselves; may with little trouble demonstrate
them one of another, according to those several respects and mutual
relations he has given them one to another; wherein, however things
agree or disagree in their own nature, he needs mind nothing but his
own notions, with the names he hath bestowed upon them: but thereby no
more increases in his own knowledge than he does his riches, who,
taking a bag of counters, calls one in a certain place a pound,
another in another place a shilling, and a third in a third place a
penny; and so proceeding, may undoubtedly reckon right, and cast up
a great sum, according to his counters so placed, and standing for
more or less as he pleases, without being one jot the richer, or
without even knowing how much a pound, shilling, or penny is, but only
that one is contained in the other twenty times, and contains the
other twelve: which a man may also do in the signification of words,
by making them, in respect of one another, more or less, or equally
comprehensive.
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