r be denominated from them.

34. Seventhly, Language is often abused by Figurative Speech.

Since wit and fancy find easier entertainment in the world than dry
truth and real knowledge, figurative speeches and allusion in language
will hardly be admitted as an imperfection or abuse of it. I confess, in
discourses where we seek rather pleasure and delight than information
and improvement, such ornaments as are borrowed from them can scarce
pass for faults. But yet if we would speak of things as they are, we
must allow that all the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness;
all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath
invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the
passions, and thereby mislead the judgment; and so indeed are perfect
cheats: and therefore, however laudable or allowable oratory may render
them in harangues and popular addresses, they are certainly, in all
discourses that pretend to inform or instruct, wholly to be avoided; and
where truth and knowledge are concerned, cannot but be thought a great
fault, either of the language or person that makes use of them. What and
how various they are, will be superfluous here to take notice; the books
of rhetoric which abound in the world, will instruct those who want to
be informed: only I cannot but observe how little the preservation and
improvement of truth and knowledge is the care and concern of mankind;
since the arts of fallacy are endowed and preferred. It is evident how
much men love to deceive and be deceived, since rhetoric, that powerful
instrument of error and deceit, has its established professors, is
publicly taught, and has always been had in great reputation: and I
doubt not but it will be thought great boldness, if not brutality, in me
to have said thus much against it. Eloquence, like the fair sex, has too
prevailing beauties in it to suffer itself ever to be spoken against.
And it is in vain to find fault with those arts of deceiving, wherein
men find pleasure to be deceived.

CHAPTER XI.

OF THE REMEDIES OF THE FOREGOING IMPERFECTIONS AND ABUSES OF WORDS.

1. Remedies are worth seeking.

The natural and improved imperfections of languages we have seen above
at large: and speech being the great bond that holds society together,
and the common conduit, whereby the improvements of knowledge are
conveyed from one man and one generation to another, it would well
deserve our most serious