t which gives our thoughts
entrance into other men's minds with the greatest ease and advantage:
and therefore deserves some part of our care and study, especially in
the names of moral words. The proper signification and use of terms
is best to be learned from those who in their writings and discourses
appear to have had the clearest notions, and applied to them their terms
with the exactest choice and fitness. This way of using a man's words,
according to the propriety of the language, though it have not always
the good fortune to be understood; yet most commonly leaves the blame
of it on him who is so unskilful in the language he speaks, as not to
understand it when made use of as it ought to be.

12. Fourth Remedy: To declare the meaning in which we use them.

Fourthly, But, because common use has not so visibly annexed any
signification to words, as to make men know always certainly what they
precisely stand for: and because men, in the improvement of their
knowledge, come to have ideas different from the vulgar and ordinary
received ones, for which they must either make new words, (which men
seldom venture to do, for fear of being thought guilty of affectation or
novelty,) or else must use old ones in a new signification: therefore,
after the observation of the foregoing rules, it is sometimes necessary,
for the ascertaining the signification of words, to DECLARE THEIR
MEANING; where either common use has left it uncertain and loose, (as it
has in most names of very complex ideas;) or where the term, being very
material in the discourse, and that upon which it chiefly turns, is
liable to any doubtfulness or mistake.

13. And that in three Ways.

As the ideas men's words stand for are of different sorts, so the way of
making known the ideas they stand for, when there is occasion, is also
different. For though DEFINING be thought the proper way to make known
the proper signification of words; yet there are some words that will
not be defined, as there are others whose precise meaning cannot be made
known but by definition: and perhaps a third, which partake somewhat of
both the other, as we shall see in the names of simple ideas, modes, and
substances.

14. In Simple Ideas, either by synonymous terms, or by showing examples.

I. First, when a man makes use of the name of any simple idea, which
he perceives is not understood, or is in danger to be mistaken, he is
obliged, by the laws of ingenuity and the