This is so necessary in the use of language, that in this respect the knowing and the ignorant, the learned and the unlearned, use the words they speak (with any meaning) all alike.  They, in every man’s mouth, stand for the ideas he has, and which he would express by them.  A child having taken notice of nothing in the metal he hears called gold, but the bright shining yellow colour, he applies the word gold only to his own idea of that colour, and nothing else; and therefore calls the same colour in a peacock’s tail gold.  Another that hath better observed, adds to shining yellow great weight:  and then the sound gold, when he uses it, stands for a complex idea of a shining yellow and a very weighty substance.  Another adds to those qualities fusibility:  and then the word gold signifies to him a body, bright, yellow, fusible, and very heavy.  Another adds malleability.  Each of these uses equally the word gold, when they have occasion to express the idea which they have applied it to:  but it is evident that each can apply it only to his own idea; nor can he make it stand as a sign of such a complex idea as he has not.

4.  Words are often secretly referred, First to the Ideas supposed to be in other men’s minds.

But though words, as they are used by men, can properly and immediately signify nothing but the ideas that are in the mind of the speaker; yet they in their thoughts give them a secret reference to two other things.

First, they suppose their words to be marks of the ideas in the minds also of other men, with whom they communicate; for else they should talk in vain, and could not be understood, if the sounds they applied to one idea were such as by the hearer were applied to another, which is to speak two languages.  But in this men stand not usually to examine, whether the idea they, and those they discourse with have in their minds be the same:  but think it enough that they use the word, as they imagine, in the common acceptation of that language; in which they suppose that the idea they make it a sign of is precisely the same to which the understanding men of that country apply that name.

5.  Secondly, to the Reality of Things.

Secondly, Because men would not be thought to talk barely of their own imagination, but of things as really they are; therefore they often suppose the words to stand also for the reality of things.  But this relating more particularly to substances and their names, as perhaps the former does to simple ideas and modes, we shall speak of these two different ways of applying words more at large, when we come to treat of the names of mixed modes and substances in particular:  though give me leave here to say, that it is a perverting the use of words, and brings unavoidable obscurity and confusion into their signification, whenever we make them stand for anything but those ideas we have in our own minds.