important they may be in the eyes of men, the names of particular persons, places, or things, because they convey only particular ideas, do not properly belong to what we call our language.  Lexicographers do not collect and define proper names, because they are beyond the limits of their art, and can be explained only from history.  I do not say that proper names are to be excluded from grammar; but I would show wherein consists the superiority of general terms over these.  For if our common words did not differ essentially from proper names, we could demonstrate nothing in science:  we could not frame from them any general or affirmative proposition at all; because all our terms would be particular, and not general; and because every individual thing in nature must necessarily be for ever itself only, and not an other.

OBS. 2.—­Our common words, then, are the symbols neither of external particulars, nor merely of the sensible ideas which external particulars excite in our minds, but mainly of those general or universal ideas which belong rather to the intellect than to the senses.  For intellection differs from sensation, somewhat as the understanding of a man differs from the perceptive faculty of a brute; and language, being framed for the reciprocal commerce of human minds, whose perceptions include both, is made to consist of signs of ideas both general and particular, yet without placing them on equal ground.  Our general ideas—­that is, our ideas conceived as common to many individuals, existing in any part of time, past, present, or future—­such, for example, as belong to the words man, horse, tree, cedar, wave, motion, strength, resist—­such ideas, I say, constitute that most excellent significance which belongs to words primarily, essentially, and immediately; whereas, our particular ideas, such as are conceived only of individual objects, which arc infinite in number and ever fleeting, constitute a significance which belongs to language only secondarily, accidentally, and mediately.  If we express the latter at all, we do it either by proper names, of which but very few ever become generally known, or by means of certain changeable limitations which are added to our general terms; whereby language, as Harris observes, “without wandering into infinitude, contrives how to denote things infinite.”—­Hermes, p. 345.  The particular manner in which this is done, I shall show hereafter, in Etymology, when I come to treat of articles and definitives.

OBS. 3.—­If we examine the structure of proper names, we shall find that most of them are compounds, the parts of which have, in very many instances, some general signification.  Now a complete phrase commonly conveys some particular notion or conception of the mind; but, in this case, the signification of the general terms is restricted by the other words which are added to them.  Thus smith is a more general term than goldsmith; and goldsmith