"Entendimiento humano" - читать интересную книгу автора (Locke John)

therefore, shall be the matter of the following chapters.




CHAPTER II.

OF THE SIGNIFICATION OF WORDS.


1. Words are sensible Signs, necessary for Communication of Ideas.

Man, though he have great variety of thoughts, and such from which
others as well as himself might receive profit and delight; yet they are
all within his own breast, invisible and hidden from others, nor can of
themselves be made to appear. The comfort and advantage of society not
being to be had without communication of thoughts, it was necessary
that man should find out some external sensible signs, whereof those
invisible ideas, which his thoughts are made up of, might be made known
to others. For this purpose nothing was so fit, either for plenty or
quickness, as those articulate sounds, which with so much ease and
variety he found himself able to make. Thus we may conceive how WORDS,
which were by nature so well adapted to that purpose, came to be made
use of by men as the signs of their ideas; not by any natural connexion
that there is between particular articulate sounds and certain ideas,
for then there would be but one language amongst all men; but by a
voluntary imposition, whereby such a word is made arbitrarily the mark
of such an idea. The use, then, of words, is to be sensible marks of
ideas; and the ideas they stand for are their proper and immediate
signification.


2. Words, in their immediate Signification, are the sensible Signs of
his Ideas who uses them.

The use men have of these marks being either to record their own
thoughts, for the assistance of their own memory; or, as it were, to
bring out their ideas, and lay them before the view of others: words,
in their primary or immediate signification, stand for nothing but THE
IDEAS IN THE MIND OF HIM THAT USES THEM, how imperfectly soever or
carelessly those ideas are collected from the things which they are
supposed to represent. When a man speaks to another, it is that he may
be understood: and the end of speech is, that those sounds, as marks,
may make known his ideas to the hearer. That then which words are the
marks of are the ideas of the speaker: nor can any one apply them as
marks, immediately, to anything else but the ideas that he himself hath:
for this would be to make them signs of his own conceptions, and yet
apply them to other ideas; which would be to make them signs and not
signs of his ideas at the same time; and so in effect to have no
signification at all. Words being voluntary signs, they cannot be