4. This occasioned by men learning names before they have the ideas the names belong to.
Men having been
accustomed from their cradles to learn words which are easily got and retained, before they knew or had framed
the complex ideas to which they were annexed, or which were to be found in the things they were thought to stand
for, they usually continue to do so all their lives; and without taking the pains necessary to settle in their minds
determined ideas, they use their words for such unsteady and confused notions as they have, contenting
themselves with the same words other people use; as if their very sound necessarily carried with it constantly the
same meaning. This, though men make a shift with in the ordinary occurrences of life, where they find it
necessary to be understood, and therefore they make signs till they are so; yet this insignificancy in their words,
when they come to reason concerning either their tenets or interest, manifestly fills their discourse with abundance
of empty unintelligible noise and jargon, especially in moral matters, where the words for the most part standing
for arbitrary and numerous collections of ideas, not regularly and permanently united in nature, their bare sounds
are often only thought on, or at least very obscure and uncertain notions annexed to them. Men take the words
they find in use amongst their neighbors; and that they may not seem ignorant what they stand for, use them
confidently, without much troubling their heads about a certain fixed meaning; whereby, besides the ease of it,
they obtain this advantage, That, as in such discourses they seldom are in the right, so they are as seldom to be
convinced that they are in the wrong; it being all one to go about to draw those men out of their mistakes who
have no settled notions, as to dispossess a vagrant of his habitation who has no settled abode. This I guess to be
so; and every one may observe in himself and others whether it be so or not.
