An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 1

This Treatise, which is grown up under your lordship's eye, and has

ventured into the world by your order, does now, by a natural kind of

right, come to your lordship for that protection which you several years

since promised it. It is not that I think any name, how great soever,

set at the beginning of a book, will be able to cover the faults that

are to be found in it. Things in print must stand and fall by their own

worth, or the reader's fancy. But there being nothing more to be desired

for truth than a fair unprejudiced hearing, nobody is more likely to

procure me that than your lordship, who are allowed to have got so

intimate an acquaintance with her, in her more retired recesses. Your

lordship is known to have so far advanced your speculations in the most

abstract and general knowledge of things, beyond the ordinary reach or

common methods, that your allowance and approbation of the design of

this Treatise will at least preserve it from being condemned without

reading, and will prevail to have those parts a little weighed, which

might otherwise perhaps be thought to deserve no consideration, for

being somewhat out of the common road. The imputation of Novelty is a

terrible charge amongst those who judge of men's heads, as they do of

their perukes, by the fashion, and can allow none to be right but the

received doctrines.