whose views are comprehensive; nor is any man satisfied with himself
because he has done much, but because he can conceive little. When
first I engaged in this work, I resolved to leave neither words
nor things unexamined, and pleased myself with a prospect of the
hours which I should revel away in feasts of literature, with the
obscure recesses of northern learning, which I should enter and
ransack; the treasures with which I expected every search into those
neglected mines to reward my labour, and the triumph with which I
should display my acquisitions to mankind. When I had thus enquired
into the original of words, I resolved to show likewise my attention
to things; to pierce deep into every science, to enquire the nature
of every substance of which I inserted the name, to limit every idea
by a definition strictly logical, and exhibit every production of
art or nature in an accurate description, that my book might be in
place of all other dictionaries whether appellative or technical.
But these were the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake
a lexicographer. I soon found that it is too late to look for
instruments, when the work calls for execution, and that whatever
abilities I had brought to my task, with those I must finally
perform it. To deliberate whenever I doubted, to enquire whenever
I was ignorant, would have protracted the undertaking without end,
and, perhaps, without much improvement; for I did not find by my
first experiments, that that I had not of my own was easily to be
obtained: I saw that one enquiry only gave occasion to another,
that book referred to book, that to search was not always to find,
and to find was not always to be informed; and that thus to persue
perfection, was, like the first inhabitants of Arcadia, to chace
the sun, which, when they had reached the hill where he seemed to
rest, was still beheld at the same distance from them.