[An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. by John Locke]@TWC D-Link book
An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I.

CHAPTER XVIII
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those of unity, duration, and motion, &c., above instanced in, as also power and thinking, have been thus modified to a great variety of complex ideas, with names belonging to them.
7.

Why some Modes have, and others have not, Names.
The reason whereof, I suppose, has been this,--That the great concernment of men being with men one amongst another, the knowledge of men, and their actions, and the signifying of them to one another, was most necessary; and therefore they made ideas of ACTIONS very nicely modified, and gave those complex ideas names, that they might the more easily record and discourse of those things they were daily conversant in, without long ambages and circumlocutions; and that the things they were continually to give and receive information about might be the easier and quicker understood.

That this is so, and that men in framing different complex ideas, and giving them names, have been much governed by the end of speech in general, (which is a very short and expedite way of conveying their thoughts one to another), is evident in the names which in several arts have been found out, and applied to several complex ideas of modified actions, belonging to their several trades, for dispatch sake, in their direction or discourses about them.

Which ideas are not generally framed in the minds of men not conversant about these operations.

And thence the words that stand for them, by the greatest part of men of the same language, are not understood: v.


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