written gives thee any desire that I should have gone further. If it
seems too much to thee, thou must blame the subject; for when I put pen
to paper, I thought all I should have to say on this matter would have
been contained in one sheet of paper; but the further I went the
larger prospect I had; new discoveries led me still on, and so it grew
insensibly to the bulk it now appears in. I will not deny, but possibly
it might be reduced to a narrower compass than it is, and that some
parts of it might be contracted, the way it has been writ in, by
catches, and many long intervals of interruption, being apt to cause
some repetitions. But to confess the truth, I am now too lazy, or too
busy, to make it shorter. I am not ignorant how little I herein consult
my own reputation, when I knowingly let it go with a fault, so apt to
disgust the most judicious, who are always the nicest readers. But they
who know sloth is apt to content itself with any excuse, will pardon me
if mine has prevailed on me, where I think I have a very good one. I
will not therefore allege in my defence, that the same notion, having
different respects, may be convenient or necessary to prove or
illustrate several parts of the same discourse, and that so it has
happened in many parts of this: but waiving that, I shall frankly avow
that I have sometimes dwelt long upon the same argument, and expressed
it different ways, with a quite different design. I pretend not to
publish this Essay for the information of men of large thoughts and
quick apprehensions; to such masters of knowledge I profess myself a
scholar, and therefore warn them beforehand not to expect anything here,
but what, being spun out of my own coarse thoughts, is fitted to men of
my own size, to whom, perhaps, it will not be unacceptable that I have
taken some pains to make plain and familiar to their thoughts some
truths which established prejudice, or the abstractedness of the ideas
themselves, might render difficult. Some objects had need be turned on
every side; and when the notion is new, as I confess some of these are