consisting of but one single letter, of which there are reckoned up, as
I remember, seventy, I am sure above fifty, several significations.


5. Instance in But.

'But' is a particle, none more familiar in our language: and he that
says it is a discretive conjunction, and that it answers to sed Latin,
or mais in French, thinks he has sufficiently explained it. But yet it
seems to me to intimate several relations the mind gives to the several
propositions or parts of them which it joins by this monosyllable.

First, 'But to say no more:' here it intimates a stop of the mind in the
course it was going, before it came quite to the end of it.

Secondly, 'I saw but two plants;' here it shows that the mind limits the
sense to what is expressed, with a negation of all other.

Thirdly,'You pray; but it is not that God would bring you to the true
religion.'

Fourthly, 'But that he would confirm you in your own.' The first of
these BUTS intimates a supposition in the mind of something otherwise
than it should be; the latter shows that the mind makes a direct
opposition between that and what goes before it.

Fifthly, 'All animals have sense, but a dog is an animal:' here it
signifies little more but that the latter proposition is joined to the
former, as the minor of a syllogism.