only conceivable by the
assistance of speech. The definition of a triangle can alone give you
a just idea of that figure: the moment you form a triangle in your
mind, it is this or that particular triangle and no other, and you
cannot avoid giving breadth to its lines and colour to its area. We
must therefore make use of propositions; we must therefore speak to
have general ideas; for the moment the imagination stops, the mind
must stop too, if not assisted by speech. If therefore the first
inventors could give no names to any ideas but those they had already,
it follows that the first substantives could never have been anything
more than proper names.

But when by means, which I cannot conceive, our new grammarians began
to extend their ideas, and generalize their words, the ignorance of
the inventors must have confined this method to very narrow bounds;
and as they had at first too much multiplied the names of individuals
for want of being acquainted with the distinctions called genus and
species, they afterwards made too few genera and species for want of
having considered beings in all their differences; to push the
divisions far enough, they must have had more knowledge and experience
than we can allow them, and have made more researches and taken more
pains, than we can suppose them willing to submit to. Now if, even at
this present time, we every day discover new species, which had before
escaped all our observations, how many species must have escaped the
notice of men, who judged of things merely from their first
appearances! As to the primitive classes and the most general notions,
it were superfluous to add that these they must have likewise
overlooked: how, for example, could they have thought of or understood
the words, matter, spirit, substance, mode, figure, motion, since even
our philosophers, who for so long a time have been constantly
employing these terms, can themselves scarcely understand them, and
since the ideas annexed to these words being purely metaphysical, no
models of them could be found in nature?

I stop at these first advances, and beseech my judges to suspend their
lecture a little, in order to consider, what a great way language has
still to go, in regard to the invention of physical substantives
alone, (though the easiest part of language to invent,) to be able to
express all the sentiments of man, to assume an invariable form, to
bear being spoken in public and to influence society