5. Instance in but.
"But" is a particle, none more familiar in our language: and he that says it is a discretive
conjunction, and that it answers to sed Latin, or mais in French, thinks he has sufficiently explained it. But yet it
seems to me to intimate several relations the mind gives to the several propositions or parts of them which it joins
by this monosyllable.
First, "But to say no more": here it intimates a stop of the mind in the course it was going, before it came quite to
the end of it.
Secondly, "I saw but two plants"; here it shows that the mind limits the sense to what is expressed, with a
negation of all other.
Thirdly, "You pray; but it is not that God would bring you to the true religion."
Fourthly, "But that he would confirm you in your own." The first of these buts intimates a supposition in the mind
of something otherwise than it should be: the latter shows that the mind makes a direct opposition between that
and what goes before it.
Fifthly, "All animals have sense, but a dog is an animal": here it signifies little more but that the latter proposition
is joined to the former, as the minor of a syllogism.
