Constructing a term list may seem like an innocuous operation, but it is really a very sly one. In the case of the Dictionary of Sensibility, finding the terms that would structure the project was at once empiricist and evaluative: empiricist, because the terms chosen have a tendency to advertise themselves in bold letters on almost every page of the sensibility texts under consideration; evaluative, because our nominations were colored by an awareness that the terms we picked would have to become our own highest critical terms. It was therefore important, too, to find terms that were not primarily or exclusively thematic, but instead were explicitly critical, and as such could actually become the critical apparatus of the project. This aspect of the term selection was especially well-suited to the literature of sensibility since the basic terms of eighteenth-century aesthetic and moral philosophy -- terms like "nature," "character," and "heart," to name just three -- are so explicitly theorized within the literature of sensibility itself. Our fleeting sense of ownership, or maybe custodianship, of the terms in question, made us careful not to take liberties with them; while the passages we annotated became fair game for strong reading and revision, the terms themselves were not to be taken lightly. The terms must not be a "key" for reading; instead, the passages were seen as avenues for approaching the terms. The assimilation of many multiple perspectives under the rubric of a single term was an object lesson in historical sensitivity. Just as the diversity of the group enterprise could easily be translated into a sense of the multivalence of our terms, it tended likewise to bridge the historical distance between our own critical environment and that of the eighteenth-century sensibilitarians, allowing us to stumble, ourselves, on the uncertainties and contradictions of those earlier debates.
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