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An essay concerning human understanding

  
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[title page]
  
To The Right Honourable Lord Thomas,
  
Epistle to the Reader

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Introduction An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
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Book I Neither Principles Nor Ideas Are Innate
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Book II Of Ideas
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Book III Of Words
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Chapter I Of Words or Language in General
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Chapter II Of the Signification of Words
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Chapter III Of General Terms
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Chapter IV Of the Names of Simple Ideas
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Chapter V Of the Names of Mixed Modes and Relations
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Chapter VI Of the Names of Substances
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Chapter VII Of Particles
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Chapter VIII Of Abstract and Concrete Terms
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Chapter IX Of the Imperfection of Words
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Chapter X Of the Abuse of Words
  
1. Woeful abuse of words.
  
2. Words are often employed without any, or without clear ideas.
  
3. II.
  
4. This occasioned by men learning names before they have the ideas the names belong to.
  
5. Unsteady application of them.
  
6. Thirdly Affected obscurity, as in the Peripatetick and other sects of philosophy.
  
7. Logic and dispute have much contributed to this.
  
8. Calling it "subtlety.
  
9. This learning very little benefits society.
  
10. But destroys the instruments of knowledge and communication.
  
11. As useful as to confound the sounds that the letters of the alphabet stand for.
  
12. This art has perplexed religion and justice.
  
13. And ought not to pass for learning.
  
14. Fourthly, by taking words for things.
  
15. Instance, in matter.
  
16. This makes errors lasting.
  
17. Fifthly, by setting them in the place of what they cannot signify.
  
18. V.g. Putting them for the real essences of substances.
  
19. Hence we think change of our complex ideas of substances not to change their species.
  
20. The cause of this abuse, a supposition of nature's working always regularly, in setting boundaries to species.
  
21. This abuse contains two false suppositions.
  
22. Sixthly by proceeding upon the supposition that the words we use have a certain and evident signification which other men cannot but understand.
  
23. The ends of language: First, to convey our ideas.
  
24. Seconly, To do it with quickness.
  
25. Thirdly, Therewith to convey the knowledge of things.
  
26. How men's words fail in all these: First, when used without any ideas.
  
27. Secondly, when complex ideas are without names annexed to them.
  
28. Thirdly, when the same sign is not put for the same idea.
  
29. Fourthly, when words are diverted from their common use.
  
30. Fifthly, when they are names of fantastical imaginations.
  
31. Summary.
  
32. How men's words fail when they stand for substances.
  
33. How when they stand for modes and relations.
  
34. Seventhly, language is often abused by figurative speech.
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Chapter XI Of the Remedies of the Foregoing Imperfections and Abuses of Words
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Book IV Of Knowledge and Probability

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1. Woeful abuse of words.

Besides the imperfection that is naturally in language, and the obscurity and confusion that is so hard to be avoided in the use of words, there are several wilful faults and neglects which men are guilty of in this way of communication, whereby they render these signs less clear and distinct in their signification than naturally they need to be.

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