5. Words ultimately derived from such as signify sensible ideas.
It may also lead us a little towards the original of
all our notions and knowledge, if we remark how great a dependence our words have on common sensible ideas;
and how those which are made use of to stand for actions and notions quite removed from sense, have their rise
from thence, and from obvious sensible ideas are transferred to more abstruse significations, and made to stand
for ideas that come not under the cognizance of our senses; v.g. to imagine, apprehend, comprehend, adhere,
conceive, instil, disgust, disturbance, tranquillity, etc., are all words taken from the operations of sensible things,
and applied to certain modes of thinking. Spirit, in its primary signification, is breath; angel, a messenger: and I
doubt not but, if we could trace them to their sources, we should find, in all languages, the names which stand for
things that fall not under our senses to have had their first rise from sensible ideas. By which we may give some
kind of guess what kind of notions they were, and whence derived, which filled their minds who were the first
beginners of languages, and how nature, even in the naming of things, unawares suggested to men the originals
and principles of all their knowledge: whilst, to give names that might make known to others any operations they
felt in themselves, or any other ideas that came not under their senses, they were fain to borrow words from
ordinary known ideas of sensation, by that means to make others the more easily to conceive those operations
they experimented in themselves, which made no outward sensible appearances; and then, when they had got
known and agreed names to signify those internal operations of their own minds, they were sufficiently furnished
to make known by words all their other ideas; since they could consist of nothing but either of outward sensible
perceptions, or of the inward operations of their minds about them; we having, as has been proved, no ideas at all,
but what originally come either from sensible objects without, or what we feel within ourselves, from the inward
workings of our own spirits, of which we are conscious to ourselves within.
