About the author

John Wilkins (b. 1614, d. 19 November 1672), a founding member and active fellow of the Royal Society, was one of the pre-eminent natural philosophers of the seventeenth century.

About the text

Wilkins's project responds to one of the era's most vexing epistemological problems: the English language with its rhetorical excess, grammatical idiosyncrasy, and verbal arbitrariness impedes the clear transmission of knowledge and truth. So grave was the situation, even the Royal Society sought to establish mathematical plainness and precise expression in scientific communication so that the order of thoughts could achieve congruence with the order of things. Wilkins's Essay thus formulates a universal language that would be advantageous to ‘facilitating mutual commerce’, improving ‘Natural Knowledge’ and ‘spreading of the knowledge of Religion’. In effect, it seeks to reverse the curse of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9), by which God punished a united mankind for building a tower the height of heaven. God confounded the single language of the builders and caused it to split into diverse tongues, which were scattered throughout the earth.

Wilkins designed his artificial language to produce ‘the shortest and plainest way for the attainment of real knowledge’ by categorising things and notions, dividing them into their subgroups and assigning them letters and symbols. Combining or interpreting symbol and letter sequences enabled the practitioner to create or discern meaning. Wilkins's artificial language categorises all knowledge into various classes and subclasses. A Ramist-like chart maps out the relations among forty genera (or ‘more common heads of things’); see Figure III.2. Each genus is subdivided into ‘differences’ (252 in total), and each class of ‘difference’ is further subdivided into ‘species’ (2,034). For example, he divides the genus ‘beast’ (XVIII) into six ‘differences’ from ‘whole-footed’ to ‘oviparous’. In the first ‘difference’ there are four species of ‘whole-footed’ beasts: horse, ass/mule, camel and elephant. The first species, ‘horse’, also indicates ‘mare, gelding, nag’, etc. A ‘horse’, or its associated species, is thus the first species of the first difference of the eighteenth genus. Wilkins's ‘Real Character’ uses written symbols – a straight line overwritten with a series of various strokes, hooks and loops – to indicate the genus, difference, and species. With his ‘philosophical language…made effable’ (i.e. to be spoken aloud), Wilkins assigns each genus a certain combination of letters.