Bridge of Words

Such was the problem with the boldest attempt to answer Bacon's call, that of John Wilkins (1614-1672), the first secretary of the Royal Society (and Oliver Cromwell's brother-in-law). Wilkins was a man of large ambitions, undertaking to develop a comprehensive, "pansophic" system of knowledge. Devoting five years to his pansophic obsession, Wilkins tried to tabulate all knowledge in the form of concept trees split by distinctions based on sensory data. In the case of animals, his taxonomies are recondite but effective; but to define tickling via rigorous concept trees was another story. Tickling, in Wilkins's view, was a titillation (rather than a piercing) entailing "dissipation of the spirits in the softer parts by a light touch" (as opposed to "distention or compression of parts" or "obstruction in nerves or muscles"), and which while light is nonetheless painful (unlike actions that "satisfy appetites"), and which is a corporeal action addressed to "sensitive bodies" (as opposed to "vegetative" or "rational" ones), an action absolute (rather than relative) and peculiar to living creatures (as opposed to an action imitative of the gestures of creatures).

In Wilkins's Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language—a tome measuring two feet by one foot—"real characters" finally appear in Section III. Here Wilkins rendered in strange glyphs each of the ultimate terms in his branching tables. To rocket language beyond ambiguity, he invented a script that looked like squadrons of tiny antennaed spaceships. The problem was that there were 2,030 distinct characters, so that to use them would require prodigious feats of memory. As a work-around, Wilkins then represented each glyph by combinations of letters. "For instance," he wrote, "If (De) signifie Element then (Deb) must signifie the first difference; which (according to the Tables) is fire: and (Deba) will denote the first Species, which is Flame. (Det) will be the first difference under that Genus, which is Appearing Meteor (Deta) the first Species, viz. Rainbow; (Deta) the second, viz. Halo." But loading each letter with such a huge burden of information was dangerous; stuff happens, including misprints. For example, if my son writes to me about his "psythology" instead of "psychology" paper, chances are I'll chalk it up to a late night out, but if Wilkins's "Deb" appears in lieu of "Det," we're dealing with a meteor instead of a fire.

The pitfall of Wilkins's Essay is not the multiplicity of characters; it's the multiplicity of words. Heaping up terms to make precise categories and heaping up categories to make precise distinctions, Wilkins delivered heaps and heaps of words, not universal ideas. Moreover, tall stacks of words were left off the tables; an appendix includes a dictionary of some fifteen thousand English words keyed to the tables by synonyms and periphrases. In Wilkins's system, there was even a metaphor particle that magically transformed any word into a figure of speech—"dark," for example, into "mystical."² Figures within characters, characters within universes, wheels within wheels.

Wilkins's very public failure to invent a language purely of ideas provoked extreme responses. On one hand, the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) sought a method for producing knowledge rather than organizing, defining, and representing it. His caracteristica were designed to reckon with truths as one would with numbers, to conduct ratiocination by means of numerical ratios. And with such a calculus, blind to the particular propositions being manipulated, Leibniz claimed the power to put truths to the test, and even to discover new ones. On the other hand, Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), in Gullivefs Travels (1726), skewered the idea of a "Universal Language to be understood in all civilized Nations." In the Academy of Lagado, Gulliver encounters "a Scheme for entirely abolishing all Words whatsoever;. that since Words are only Names for Things, it would be more convenient for all Men to carry about them, such Things as were necessary to express the particular Business they are to discourse on." "I have often," continues the empiricist Gulliver, "beheld two of those Sages almost sinking under the Weight of their Packs, like Pedlars among us; who, when they met in the Streets, would lay down their Loads, open their Sacks, and hold Conversation for an Hour together; then put up their Implements, help each other to resume their Burthens, and take their Leave."

Leibniz envisioned a shining steel language of logic beyond the stain of things; Swift satirized a bulky language of things beyond the trammels of logic. At the end of the dream of a universal language without misunderstanding lies a language without words.

3. A World of Words