Instance in But.
'But' is a particle, none more familiar in our language: and he that says it is a discretive conjunction, and that it answers to sed Latin, or mais in French, thinks he has sufficiently explained it.

But yet it seems to me to intimate several relations the mind gives to the several propositions or parts of them which it joins by this monosyllable.
First, 'But to say no more:' here it intimates a stop of the mind in the course it was going, before it came quite to the end of it.
Secondly, 'I saw but two plants;' here it shows that the mind limits the sense to what is expressed, with a negation of all other.
Thirdly,'You pray; but it is not that God would bring you to the true religion.' Fourthly, 'But that he would confirm you in your own.' The first of these BUTS intimates a supposition in the mind of something otherwise than it should be; the latter shows that the mind makes a direct opposition between that and what goes before it.
Fifthly, 'All animals have sense, but a dog is an animal:' here it signifies little more but that the latter proposition is joined to the former, as the minor of a syllogism.
6.

This Matter of the use of Particles but lightly touched here.
To these, I doubt not, might be added a great many other significations of this particle, if it were my business to examine it in its full latitude, and consider it in all the places it is to be found: which if one should do, I doubt whether in all those manners it is made use of, it would deserve the title of DISCRETIVE, which grammarians give to it.
But I intend not here a full explication of this sort of signs.

The instances I have given in this one may give occasion to reflect on their use and force in language, and lead us into the contemplation of several actions of our minds in discoursing, which it has found a way to intimate to others by these particles, some whereof constantly, and others in certain constructions, have the sense of a whole sentence contained in them..