signification of the name that stands for such voluntary
collections should be often various in the minds of different men, who
have scarce any standing rule to regulate themselves and their notions
by, in such arbitrary ideas.

8. Common use, or propriety not a sufficient Remedy.

It is true, common use, that is, the rule of propriety may be supposed
here to afford some aid, to settle the signification of language; and it
cannot be denied but that in some measure it does. Common use regulates
the meaning of words pretty well for common conversation; but nobody
having an authority to establish the precise signification of words,
nor determine to what ideas any one shall annex them, common use is
not sufficient to adjust them to Philosophical Discourses; there being
scarce any name of any very complex idea (to say nothing of others)
which, in common use, has not a great latitude, and which, keeping
within the bounds of propriety, may not be made the sign of far
different ideas. Besides, the rule and measure of propriety itself being
nowhere established, it is often matter of dispute, whether this or that
way of using a word be propriety of speech or no. From all which it is
evident, that the names of such kind of very complex ideas are
naturally liable to this imperfection, to be of doubtful and uncertain
signification; and even in men that have a mind to understand one
another, do not always stand for the same idea in speaker and hearer.
Though the names GLORY and GRATITUDE be the same in every man's mouth
through a whole country, yet the complex collective idea which every one
thinks on or intends by that name, is apparently very different in men
using the same language.

9. The way of learning these Names contributes also to their
Doubtfulness.

The way also wherein the names of mixed modes are ordinarily learned,
does not a little contribute to the doubtfulness of their signification.
For if we will observe how children learn languages, we shall find that,
to make them understand what the names of simple ideas or substances
stand for, people ordinarily show them the thing whereof they would have
them have the idea; and then repeat to them the name that stands for
it; as WHITE, SWEET, MILK, SUGAR, CAT, DOG. But as for mixed modes,
especially the most material of them, MORAL WORDS, the sounds are
usually learned first; and then, to know what complex ideas they stand
for, they are either beholden to the explicat