26. Fifth remedy: To use the same word constantly in the same sense.
V. Fifthly, If men will not be at the pains to
declare the meaning of their words, and definitions of their terms are not to be had, yet this is the least that can be
expected, that, in all discourses wherein one man pretends to instruct or convince another, he should use the same
word constantly in the same sense. If this were done, (which nobody can refuse without great disingenuity,) many
of the books extant might be spared; many of the controversies in dispute would be at an end; several of those
great volumes, swollen with ambiguous words, now used in one sense, and by and by in another, would shrink
into a very narrow compass; and many of the philosophers, (to mention no other) as well as poets works, might be
contained in a nutshell.
