However, since there are some incontestable advantages in being able to convey and receive ideas easily in mutual intercourse, it is not surprising that men have sought more and more to augment that facility. To do so, they began by reducing signs to words, because words are, so to speak, the symbols that we have most readily at hand. In addition, the order in which words are generated followed the order of the operations of the mind: after individual objects, names were given to the sensible qualities, which, though they do not exist by themselves, exist in these individual objects and are held in common by several of them. Little by little those abstract terms were achieved, some of which serve to tie ideas together, others to designate the general properties of bodies, and others to express purely intellectual notions