To avoid confusion by too few or too many divisions is a great skill in thinking as well as writing,which is but the copying our thoughts;but what are the boundaries of the mean between the two vicious excesses on both hands,I think is hard to set down in words;clear and distinct ideasis all that I yet know able to regulate it.
But as to verbal distinctions received and applied to common terms,i.e.equivocal words,they are more properly,I think,the business of criticisms and dictionaries than of real knowledge and philosophy,since they for the most part explain the meaning of words and give us their several significations.
The dexterous management of terms and being able to "fend"and "prove"with them I know has and does pass in the world for a great part of learning;but it is learning distinct from knowledge,for knowledge consists only in perceiving the habitudes and relations of ideas one to another,which is done without words;the intervention of a sound helps nothing to it.And hence we see that there is least use of distinctions where there is most knowledge;I mean in mathematics,where men have determined ideas with known names to them;and so,there being no room for equivocations,there is no need of distinctions.
In arguing,the opponent uses as comprehensive and equivocal terms as he can,to involve his adversary in the doubtfulness of his expressions;this is expected,and therefore the answerer on his side makes it his play to distinguish as much as he can and thinks he can never do it too much;nor can he indeed in that way wherein victory may be had without truth and without knowledge.This seems to me to be the art of disputing.Use your words as cautiously as you can in your arguing on one side,and apply distinctions as much as you can on the other side to every term to nonplus your opponent;so that in this sort of scholarship,there being no bounds set to distinguishing,some men have thought all acuteness to have lain in it;and therefore in all they hale read or thought on,their great business has been to amuse themselves with distinctions and multiply to themselves divisions,at least,more than the nature of the thing required.There seems to me,as I said,to be no other rule for this but a due and right consideration of things as they are in themselves.He that has settled in his mind determined ideas with names affixed to them will be able both to discern their differences one from another (which is really distinguishing)and,where the penury of words affords not terms answering every distinct idea,will be able to apply proper distinguishing terms to the comprehensive and equivocal names he is forced to make use of.This is all the need I know of distinguishing terms;and in such verbal distinctions each term of the distinction,joined to that whose signification it distinguishes,is but a new distinct name for a distinct idea.
Where they are so and men have clear and distinct conceptions that answer their verbal distinctions,they are right,and are pertinent as far as they serve to clear anything in the subject under consideration.And this is that which seems to me the proper and only measure of distinctions and divisions;which he that will conduct his understanding right must not look for in the acuteness of invention nor the authority of writers,but will find only in the consideration of things themselves,whether they are led into it by their own meditations or the information of books.
An aptness to jumble things together wherein can be found any likeness is a fault in the understanding on the other side which will not fail to mislead it and,by thus lumping of things,hinder the mind from distinct and accurate conceptions of them.
