1. Words are sensible signs, necessary for communication of ideas.
Man, though he have great variety of thoughts,
and such from which others as well as himself might receive profit and delight; yet they are all within his own
breast, invisible and hidden from others, nor can of themselves be made to appear. The comfort and advantage of
society not being to be had without communication of thoughts, it was necessary that man should find out some
external sensible signs, whereof those invisible ideas, which his thoughts are made up of, might be made known
to others. For this purpose nothing was so fit, either for plenty or quickness, as those articulate sounds, which with
so much ease and variety he found himself able to make. Thus we may conceive how words, which were by
nature so well adapted to that purpose, came to be made use of by men as the signs of their ideas; not by any
natural connexion that there is between particular articulate sounds and certain ideas, for then there would be but
one language amongst all men; but by a voluntary imposition, whereby such a word is made arbitrarily the mark
of such an idea. The use, then, of words, is to be sensible marks of ideas; and the ideas they stand for are their
proper and immediate signification.
