Language, Mind and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke (review)

Rhodri Lewis’s Language, Mind and Nature constitutes the latest installment from the Ideas in Context series edited by Quentin Skinner and James Tully and released by the Cambridge University Press. Lewis’s strong scholarship and careful writing make this a worthy addition to the series, and from the very beginning, he paints a very clear picture of the men from a variety of different intellectual disciplines joined through their interest in creating a language to bridge the increasingly apparent linguistic barriers marring scholarly communication in seventeenth-century Europe. The subtitle is a bit misleading, because one of this book’s best features is that its geographic focus does not result in the exclusion of non-English scholars who were writing to English language reformers or traveling in and out of London. The question of how early modern intellectual communities functioned is a pressing one, and Lewis provides a lovely introduction to the mechanics governing a highly diverse and impassioned group of scholars.

The book is nicely structured, beginning with a necessary introduction to the meaning of “artificial language,” the different methods proposed for creating one, and the theorists advocating for its creation. The rationale for the creation of an artifical language sprang from prevailing anxieties about “ever worsening linguistic shortcomings [that] were seen as a hindrance to the formulation of thoughts (whether of the moral, religious, political, or philosophical kind) and their transparent expression” (2). An artificial language would help to correct this problem by proving an “exact map of the order of things, and of thought” (2). An artificial language would return people to a direct relationship between the sign (the word or symbol used to communicate something) and the signified (the thing being represented) and would correct for regional and national idiosyncracies. Symbolically based languages such as Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese were frequently cited models for a new artificial language and represent the expanding universe in which early modern scholarship existed. Lewis pays careful attention to the varied and interesting models for artificial languages proposed by luminaries such as Francis Bacon — who began the seventeenth-century interest in the topic with his Advancement of Learning (expanded, 1623) — Samuel Hartlib and his circle, John Webster, and Seth Ward.

But the motivation for an artificial language was not solely scholarly — many radical Protestants, and some less-radical ones, believed that an artificial language would help to restore man to the linguistic position he had held before the Fall. “Webster and Foster envisaged a return to the condition of original purity in the days preceding the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth. Rather than attempting to reconfigure the Adamic language, the language planners’ principal goal was more modest: effectually to reverse the ‘confusionof tongues’ imposed upon humankind at Babel” (117). This is a fabulous example of early modern intellectual ambition, since as Lewis notes, the variety of languages that had inhibited communication since the fall was now remediable through human artifice.

The relationship between religion and natural philosophy has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, and Lewis adds some new information to the already complicated field. He is not as successful, however, in his attempt to argue for what seems to be an artificial division between natural and occult philosophy. By the seventeenth century, these categories were swiftly deteriorating and they were certainly highly fluid, so his lengthy exegesis on the religious and natural philosophical but not occult philosophical leanings of the artificial language movement seems forced. This may, in part, be due to the book’s genesis as Lewis’s doctoral dissertation, which is still evident in the seemingly extraneous and occasionally heavy-handed historiographic arguments that appear most notably in chapter 4, “Discursus: Artifical Languages, Religion, and the Occult.” This is a shame, because this chapter has the most potential to speak to scholars interested in the broader sweep of...