An Essay Towards a Real Character and A Philosophical Language

[Dave Monroe]

"John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester (1614–72), was a
founding member of the Royal Society and one of the
most influential thinkers of the seventeenth century.
His masterpiece, An Essay Towards a Real Character and
A Philosophical Language, is a key text in the history
of language. Ready for publication in January 1666 but
destroyed by the Great Fire, the work finally
published in 1668 is Wilkins’s attempt at creating a
universal language. Wilkins maintained that because
all people’s minds functioned in the same way and had
a similar ‘apprehension of things’, it should be
possible to cultivate a rational universal language
and a character that would also articulate things and
notions. Not only would they aid international
scientific communication and commerce, but ‘prove the
shortest and plainest way for the attainment of real
Knowledge, that hath been yet offered to the World’.
Although Wilkins’s universal language was never
adopted for common use (and he never regarded the work
as complete), it was widely considered to be superior
to the earlier work by George Dalgarno, Ars signorum
(1661)."

http://195.12.26.123/404.asp?404;http://195.12.26.123/language/wilkins.htm

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/15242.ctl

http://www.baroquecycle.com/letter1.htm

http://www.baroquecycle.com/flash.htm

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