d in one as another language. They are all marks of
some action or intimation of the mind; and therefore to understand them
rightly, the several views, postures, stands, turns, limitations, and
exceptions, and several other thoughts of the mind, for which we have
either none or very deficient names, are diligently to be studied. Of
these there is a great variety, much exceeding the number of particles
that most languages have to express them by: and therefore it is not
to be wondered that most of these particles have divers and sometimes
almost opposite significations. In the Hebrew tongue there is a particle
consisting of but one single letter, of which there are reckoned up, as
I remember, seventy, I am sure above fifty, several significations.

5. Instance in But.

'But' is a particle, none more familiar in our language: and he that
says it is a discretive conjunction, and that it answers to sed Latin,
or mais in French, thinks he has sufficiently explained it. But yet it
seems to me to intimate several relations the mind gives to the several
propositions or parts of them which it joins by this monosyllable.

First, 'But to say no more:' here it intimates a stop of the mind in the
course it was going, before it came quite to the end of it.

Secondly, 'I saw but two plants;' here it shows that the mind limits the
sense to what is expressed, with a negation of all other.

Thirdly,'You pray; but it is not that God would bring you to the true
religion.'

Fourthly, 'But that he would confirm you in your own.' The first of
these BUTS intimates a supposition in the mind of something otherwise
than it should be; the latter shows that the mind makes a direct
opposition between that and what goes before it.

Fifthly, 'All animals have sense, but a dog is an animal:' here it
signifies little more but that the latter proposition is joined to the
former, as the minor of a syllogism.

6. This Matter of the use of Particles but lightly touched here.

To these, I doubt not, might be added a great many other significations
of this particle, if it were my business to examine it in its full
latitude, and consider it in all the places it is to be found: which if
one should do, I doubt whether in all those manners it is made use of,
it would deserve the title of DISCRETIVE, which grammarians give to it.
But I intend not here a full explication of this sort of signs. The
instances I have given in this one may give occasion to