Language, Mind and Nature

In the attempt to make good one of the desiderata in Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, a cohort of philosophers, scientists, schoolmasters, clergymen and cranks attempted to devise artificial languages that would immediately represent the order of thought, held both directly to represent the order of things and to be a universal characteristic of the human mind. Language, Mind and Nature fully reconstructs, for the first time, this artificial language movement in seventeenth-century England. In so doing, it reveals a great deal about the beliefs and activities of those who sought to reform learning in the early modern period. Artificial languages straddle occult, religious and proto-scientific approaches to representation and communication, and suggest that much of the so-called ‘new philosophy’ was not very new at all. This study breaks new ground within its field, and will be of interest to anyone concerned with intellectual or linguistic history during this period.

• The most complete reconstruction of the attempts to create artificial languages in seventeenth-century England, taking in a wide range of published and unpublished sources • The first study to place the artificial language movement in its proper intellectual, social, political and religious contexts • An important re-evaluation of early modern ideas about language, natural philosophy and religion

Acknowledgements; List of illustrations; Note on the text; Abbreviations; 1. Introduction: the idol of the market; 2. Hartlibian beginnings; 3. From Oxford to the Royal Society; 4. Discursus: artificial languages, religion and the occult; 5. The Essay: Wilkins’s \'Darling\'; 6. After the Essay: reception; revision; frustration and failure; 7. Conclusion: from Pansophia to comprehension; List of manuscripts; Bibliography.