2. Words, in their immediate signification, are the sensible signs of his ideas who uses them.
The use men have of
these marks being either to record their own thoughts, for the assistance of their own memory or, as it were, to
bring out their ideas, and lay them before the view of others: words, in their primary or immediate signification,
stand for nothing but the ideas in the mind of him that uses them, how imperfectly soever or carelessly those ideas
are collected from the things which they are supposed to represent. When a man speaks to another, it is that he
may be understood: and the end of speech is, that those sounds, as marks, may make known his ideas to the
hearer. That then which words are the marks of are the ideas of the speaker: nor can any one apply them as marks,
immediately, to anything else but the ideas that he himself hath: for this would be to make them signs of his own
conceptions, and yet apply them to other ideas; which would be to make them signs and not signs of his ideas at
the same time, and so in effect to have no signification at all. Words being voluntary signs, they cannot be
voluntary signs imposed by him on things he knows not. That would be to make them signs of nothing, sounds
without signification. A man cannot make his words the signs either of qualities in things, or of conceptions in the
mind of another, whereof he has none in his own. Till he has some ideas of his own, he cannot suppose them to
correspond with the conceptions of another man; nor can he use any signs for them of another man; nor can he use
any signs for them: for thus they would be the signs of he knows not what, which is in truth to be the signs of
nothing. But when he represents to himself other men's ideas by some of his own, if he consent to give them the
same names that other men do, it is still to his own ideas; to ideas that he has, and not to ideas that he has not.