Invitation and Engagement

Invitation and Engagement: Ideology and Wilkins’s Philosophical Language Robert E. Stillman (bio) As early as October of 1662, the Royal Society was urging “Dr. Wilkins . . . to prosecute his design of an universal language.” 1 John Wilkins was among the Society’s most valued communicators: together with Henry Oldenberg, he was appointed one of its two secretaries, and was later assigned to its Correspondence Committee. Asked to supervise the Committee for Improving the English Tongue, Wilkins reviewed its work with an eye to remedying “the philosophy of the language.” 2 Other fellows—including John Beale, Seth Ward, Robert Hooke, and William Petty—had a strong interest in the creation of a universal language, but Wilkins was an especially apt choice for this Society project, for by 1662 his Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language was almost certainly work-in-progress. Confronted by the challenge of having to justify its newly institutionalized claims upon the public interest, the Royal Society identified the construction of a philosophical language as a primary goal and chose Bishop Wilkins as the appropriate man to pursue that goal’s realization. 3 [End Page 1] I begin by situating Wilkins’s Philosophical Language inside the institutional context of the early Royal Society. I do so as a necessary supplement to traditional readings of the essay that strive to interpret his project largely (sometimes exclusively) against the background of the universal language movement. The story of that movement has been well told by Hans Aarsleff, Vivian Salmon, James Knowlson, and M. M. Slaughter. 4 Follow its course as it develops in the wake of Bacon’s call for a philosophical grammar, from the publications of real characters to the production of universal languages, and much that is crucial to understanding Wilkins’s essay emerges: from his particular debts to George Dalgarno in shaping his real character, to his more general borrowings from Mersenne in shaping his attitudes about language. 5 Taken as a whole, however, the seventeenth-century universal language movement is too diversified, too factionalized among what Humphrey Tonkin has called [End Page 2] philosophical sheep and mystical goats, to explain the specific motivations inspiring Wilkins’s Philosophical Language. 6 Wilkins articulates goals broadly familiar from that movement—the enhancement of commerce, the clearing of religious differences, the development of a “scientifically” exact vocabulary; but none of those goals is sufficiently precise to explain why the essay achieves its particular organization and character as the distinctive product of a particular historical moment. I will argue that only in terms of the historically specific circumstances of Restoration culture—in light of the political concerns of the Royal Society and its public campaign to invite and engage support for the new philosophy—is it possible to explain why Wilkins’s language masters the stuff of history into the particular shape it achieves. 7 Wilkins’s longtime immersion in the universal language movement was a consequence of his deepest, most abiding interests. The universal language was “his Darling,” as John Aubrey reported, and “nothing troubled him so much when he dyed, as that he had not completed it.” 8 As a natural philosopher working to rescue real truths from “worded disputations,” Wilkins heralded the language as vehicle to “promote and facilitate the knowledge of nature.” 9 As a bishop, struggling to unmask the “wild errors” of wild words, he advertised its advantages of “clearing of some of our Modern differences in Religion” (Epistle Dedicatory, n.p.). As a citizen of London, he promoted its benefit “of facilitating mutual Commerce amongst [End Page 3] the several Nations of the World” (ibid.). And as a mighty rising man among the Restoration’s elites, keenly aware of “all the unhappy consequences” of “the Curse of the Confusion,” especially those “many impostures and cheats that are put upon men, under the disguise of affected insignificant Phrases,” he celebrated the power of philosophical commerce (“the genuine and natural importance of Words”) to undo some of Babel’s most nefarious consequences in the wider political domain (ibid.). Finally, and most importantly, as a fellow of the Royal Society dedicating his work to the Society, Wilkins emphasized the “abundant Interest” his language would pay

Ideology · Linguistics · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Law · Philosophy · Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education · Psychology

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