reckon right, and cast up a great sum, according to his counters so placed, and standing for more or less as he pleases, without being one jot the richer, or without even knowing how much a pound, shilling, or penny is, but only that one is contained in the other twenty times, and contains the other twelve:  which a man may also do in the signification of words, by making them, in respect of one another, more or less, or equally comprehensive.

11.  Thirdly, using Words variously is trifling with them.

Though yet concerning most words used in discourses, equally argumentative and controversial, there is this more to be complained of, which is the worst sort of trifling, and which sets us yet further from the certainty of knowledge we hope to attain by them, or find in them; viz. that most writers are so far from instructing us in the nature and knowledge of things, that they use their words loosely and uncertainly, and do not, by using them constantly and steadily in the same significations make plain and clear deductions of words one from another, and make their discourses coherent and clear, (how little soever they were instructive); which were not difficult to do, did they not find it convenient to shelter their ignorance or obstinacy under the obscurity and perplexedness of their terms:  to which, perhaps, inadvertency and ill custom do in many men much contribute.

12.  Marks of verbal Propositions.  First, Predication in Abstract.

To conclude.  Barely verbal propositions may be known by these following marks: 

First, All propositions wherein two abstract terms are affirmed one of another, are barely about the signification of sounds.  For since no abstract idea can be the same with any other but itself, when its abstract name is affirmed of any other term, it can signify no more but this, that it may, or ought to be called by that name; or that these two names signify the same idea.  Thus, should any one say that parsimony is frugality, that gratitude is justice, that this or that action is or is not temperate:  however specious these and the like propositions may at first sight seem, yet when we come to press them, and examine nicely what they contain, we shall find that it all amounts to nothing but the signification of those terms.

13.  Secondly, A part of the Definition predicated of any Term.

Secondly, All propositions wherein a part of the complex idea which any term stands for is predicated of that term, are only verbal:  v.g. to say that gold is a metal, or heavy.  And thus all propositions wherein more comprehensive words, called genera, are affirmed of subordinate or less comprehensive, called species, or individuals, are barely verbal.

When by these two rules we have examined the propositions that make up the discourses we ordinarily meet with, both in and out of books, we shall perhaps find that a greater part of them than is usually suspected are purely about the signification of words, and contain nothing in them but the use and application of these signs.