significations, and made to stand for ideas that come not under the
cognizance of our senses; v.g. to IMAGINE, APPREHEND, COMPREHEND,
ADHERE, CONCEIVE, INSTIL, DISGUST, DISTURBANCE, TRANQUILLITY, &c., are
all words taken from the operations of sensible things, and applied to
certain modes of thinking. SPIRIT, in its primary signification, is
breath; ANGEL, a messenger: and I doubt not but, if we could trace them
to their sources, we should find, in all languages, the names which
stand for things that fall not under our senses to have had their first
rise from sensible ideas. By which we may give some kind of guess what
kind of notions they were, and whence derived, which filled their minds
who were the first beginners of languages, and how nature, even in the
naming of things, unawares suggested to men the originals and principles
of all their knowledge: whilst, to give names that might make known to
others any operations they felt in themselves, or any other ideas that
came not under their senses, they were fain to borrow words from
ordinary known ideas of sensation, by that means to make others the more
easily to conceive those operations they experimented in themselves,
which made no outward sensible appearances; and then, when they had got
known and agreed names to signify those internal operations of their own
minds, they were sufficiently furnished to make known by words all their
other ideas; since they could consist of nothing but either of outward
sensible perceptions, or of the inward operations of their minds about
them; we having, as has been proved, no ideas at all, but what
originally come either from sensible objects without, or what we feel
within ourselves, from the inward workings of our own spirits, of which
we are conscious to ourselves within.


6. Distribution of subjects to be treated of.