8. Instances: scholastic definitions of motion.
The not observing this difference in our ideas, and their names, has
produced that eminent trifling in the schools, which is so easy to be observed in the definitions they give us of
some few of these simple ideas. For, as to the greatest part of them, even those masters of definitions were fain to
leave them untouched, merely by the impossibility they found in it. What more exquisite jargon could the wit of
man invent, than this definition:--"The act of a being in power, as far forth as in power"; which would puzzle any
rational man, to whom it was not already known by its famous absurdity, to guess what word it could ever be
supposed to be the explication of. If Tully, asking a Dutchman what beweeginge was, should have received this
explication in his own language, that it was "actus entis in potentia quatenus in potentia"; I ask whether any one
can imagine he could thereby have understood what the word beweeginge signified, or have guessed what idea a
Dutchman ordinarily had in his mind, and would signify to another, when he used that sound?
