This being so that defects and weakness in men’s understanding, as well as other faculties, come from want of a right use of their own minds, I am apt to think the fault is generally mislaid upon nature, and there is often a complaint of want of parts when the fault lies in want of a due improvement of them. We see men frequently dexterous and sharp enough in making a bargain who, if you reason with them about matters of religion, appear perfectly stupid.
5. Ideas.— I will not here, in what relates to the right conduct and improvement of the understanding, repeat again the getting clear and determined ideas,[1] and the employing our thoughts rather about them than about sounds put for them, nor of settling the signification of words which we use with ourselves in the search of truth, or with others in discoursing about it. Those hindrances of our understandings in the pursuit of knowledge I have sufficiently enlarged upon in an-
- ↑ Clear and determined ideas . . . signification of words. Locke says elsewhere: “The foundation of error and mistake in most men lies in having obscure and confused ideas, doubtful and obscure words; our words always in their signification depending upon our ideas, being clear or obscure proportionably as our notions are so, and sometimes have little more but the sound of the word for the notion of the thing.”
