oper significance to assume another that
is purely figurative.

'Tis by their Principles I reduce to naturall reason all imaginable ways by
which words alter their primitive signification to imbrace another, either
more inlarg'd or reserv'd, or never so little diversifi'd either in
Proportion or Alliance; for tis no easie matter for words to travell from
one Country to another without meeting with the same casualties, that use
to befall forreign Plants which, are seldome remov'd into a new soile, but
degenerate and either lose some of their Native virtue, or acquire some
new. But most people having met wich this generally proposall, to expresse
at first appearance, what they think with as little trouble as is possible,
it thence falls out that to ingrosse a great deal of sense in a few words,
they scarce allow enough precisely to marke out the simple ideas of their
minds, fitted out to all their severall resemblances, they that are most
simple in themselves, are commonly compounds in their significations,
neither is there any one of the least considerable, but what is diversify'd
in each Language by a thousand different modifications.

From thence proceed all the methods of inflexion, derivation, and
composition that give being to the most subtle kind of Sophistry; all the
species and forms of Nouns, Verbs, and particles that make up the oeconomy
of a Language, together withall diversity of Numbers, Genders, Cases,
tenses, Modes, and Persons which have more of Art than at first sight is
imagin'd, for the Custome of Nations hath not only authoriz'd these
inventions to vary the Cadence of words, but with an admirable facility to
expresse all the deflexions, by which an Idea of the same object may be
represented to our conceptions according as it admitts of a mixture of
resemblances, which it may have either to its effects or Causes, or as it
is related to the severall estates, wherein it subsists, to the differences
of time or place, and to all the circumstances that may accompany it,
either within or without us. As the more sensible differences of the
Languages principally consist in all these modifications; so one of the
greatest secrets of this Art is to know how choisly to select and
distinguish, both in our ideas and in the words that expresse them, that
which is principall and essentiall from what is purely accessory, subtly to
difference the first ideas from the second, the second from the third, the
simple from th