seeking out those rules and measures of human actions, which lead to
happiness, and the means to practise them. The end of this is not bare
speculation and the knowledge of truth; but right, and a conduct
suitable to it.

  4. Semeiotike. Thirdly, the third branch may be called Semeiotike,
or the doctrine of signs; the most usual whereof being words, it is
aptly enough termed also Logike, logic: the business whereof is to
consider the nature of signs, the mind makes use of for the
understanding of things, or conveying its knowledge to others. For,
since the things the mind contemplates are none of them, besides
itself, present to the understanding, it is necessary that something
else, as a sign or representation of the thing it considers, should be
present to it: and these are ideas. And because the scene of ideas
that makes one man's thoughts cannot be laid open to the immediate
view of another, nor laid up anywhere but in the memory, a no very
sure repository: therefore to communicate our thoughts to one another,
as well as record them for our own use, signs of our ideas are also
necessary: those which men have found most convenient, and therefore
generally make use of, are articulate sounds. The consideration, then,
of ideas and words as the great instruments of knowledge, makes no
despicable part of their contemplation who would take a view of
human knowledge in the whole extent of it. And perhaps if they were
distinctly weighed, and duly considered, they would afford us
another sort of logic and critic, than what we have been hitherto
acquainted with.

  5. This is the first and most general division of the objects of our
understanding. This seems to me the first and most general, as well as
natural division of the objects of our understanding. For a man can
employ his thoughts about nothing, but either, the contemplation of
things themselves, for the discovery of truth; or about the things
in his own power, which are his own actions, for the attainment of his
own ends; or the signs the mind makes use of both in the one and the
other, and the right ordering of them, for its clearer information.
All which three, viz, things, as they are in themselves knowable;
actions as they depend on us, in order to happiness; and the right use
of signs in order to knowledge, being toto coelo different, they
seemed to me to be the three great provinces of the intellectual
world, wholly separate and distinct one from another.

                               THE END
.