What is the name of this linguist/philosopher?

I read some time ago about an english linguist or encyclopedist of some kind who set out to give a number to everything in the world, so that everything would be uniquely identified. I think he was working in the 17th or 18th century. I’m hoping someone knows who this dude is. I’m not thinking of that passage from Gulliver’s Travels in which one of the projectors is trying to synthesize all of human knowledge by randomly arranging letters. This was a real guy. Please help.

It now occurs to me that I may have read this in one of the bibliographies of Chomsky’s three seminal papers on generative grammar, but I’m not sure.

Thanks in advance everyone!