Three and a half centuries before artificial intelligence renewed the problem of representing human knowledge in formal systems, Wilkins attempted something audaciously similar in ambition: to classify the world, assign its concepts determinate relationships, and construct a language capable of expressing that structure without the ambiguities of ordinary speech.

*980J. John Wilkins (1614-1672)

An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language. By John Wilkins D.D. Dean of Ripon, and Fellow of the Royal Society.

London : printed for Sa: Gellibrand, and for John Martyn printer to the Royal Society, 1668. . Price. $7,500

Folio, 2 parts in one volume, (31 x 19cm). Signatures: [A]² a-d² B-Z4 Aa-Mm⁴; aaa⁴ ²=Aa-aa-Ttt⁴ (Mmm4 blank). Engraved title vignette, with the armorial device of the Royal Society to title, 4 engraved plates (one folding), and 2 large folding tables; license leaf before title. (Minor dampstain and wormhole at upper margin of first leaves, small repair to corner of first two leaves, a few other minor stains and edge worming, edge tear on G3 repaired.) Bound in contemporary English calf, the covers elaborately ruled and tooled in blind to a geometric panel design, with a large central rectangular compartment enclosed by a repeated ornamental roll and intersecting diagonal corner panels; sympathetically rebacked with raised bands and red morocco lettering piece, corners repaired; original blanks retained. A handsome and imposing copy. There is a Birkenhead Library mark (rubber stamp on title-page verso).

John Wilkins Bishop of Chester was a founder and first Secretary of the Royal Society. He was the author of a number of works including A Discourse Concerning a New Planet in which he used arguments similar to those of Galileo, and Mercury Or, The Secret and Swift Messenger. Philosophical Language, Wilkins s most notable work, was the first comprehensive proposal of a universal language written in English. “Calls for a universal language had increased as a result of the flourishing of vernacular literature and an increasing dissatisfaction with Latin, partly with regard to the difficulty of learning it, but also with regard to its ambiguities and complexities… The vocabulary of this new language was to be built up by systematic modifications of the basic generic terms that were deemed to cover all the major categories of existence. A knowledge of the system would enable the reader, or listener, not just to recognize the signification of a word but also to understand how the referent fitted into the entire scheme of things.” ODNB.

Among of one of the most ambitious intellectual projects of the seventeenth century,Wilkins attempted to construct an entirely new symbolic system in which the structure of language reflected the structure of knowledge itself. Every concept occupied a logical place within an ordered taxonomy of nature, allowing words to express not only meaning but also their relationship to every other object and idea. The engraved tables and dictionary form the practical machinery of this remarkable philosophical language.

Written by one of the founders of the Royal Society, the Essay embodies the optimism of Restoration natural philosophy. Wilkins believed that knowledge could be made universal through systematic classification and unambiguous signs. During the final preparation of the book, the Great Fire of London destroyed his house and many of his papers, yet the work was completed with assistance from fellow natural philosophers including John Ray, Francis Willughby, Samuel Pepys, and Robert Hooke, illustrating the collaborative spirit that characterized the early Royal Society.
Although Wilkins’s universal language was never adopted, the work has acquired a remarkable afterlife. It has become a landmark in the history of linguistics, classification, scientific communication, and information systems, anticipating later discussions of taxonomy, symbolic languages, and semiotics. Modern scholars including Umberto Eco [in Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language The English translation by James Fentress was published by Blackwell in 1995. Chapter 12 is titled “John Wilkins,” pp. 238–259.]marks Wilkins as one of the central figures in the centuries-long search for a “perfect language.”

Beyond its importance to the history of linguistics, Wilkins’s Essay stands as one of the earliest attempts to organize all human knowledge into a coherent symbolic system. Its philosophical tables classify the natural world, human society, and abstract concepts into an integrated hierarchy whose symbolic notation was intended to communicate directly across linguistic boundaries. For modern readers the work has become equally significant in the history of classification, bibliography, semiotics, and the organization of information, making it one of the most intellectually influential books produced by the early Royal Society.

In Umberto Eco’s The Search for the Perfect Language, the chapter devoted to Wilkins and his attempt to construct a language whose signs would correspond not merely to words but to an ordered classification of reality. Eco emphasizes the extraordinary scale of the undertaking: Wilkins divided knowledge into forty principal genera, which were further articulated through differences and species; the resulting taxonomy supplied the conceptual structure from which both his written “Real Character” and pronounceable philosophical language were generated. The signs themselves were systematic: a fundamental graphic form identified the genus, while additional marks indicated its difference and species. Thus the reader who understood a character was intended to perceive not simply what it signified, but where that thing or concept stood within the larger order of knowledge. 

Large folding table:#1, 56X 43 cm. page 442 Wilkins’s universal classification of knowledge.
A synoptic arrangement of the genera, differences, and species upon which the philosophical language is constructed, extending from spiritual and corporeal actions through motion, occupations, possessions, civil and political relations, naval and military affairs, and ecclesiastical matters. The table demonstrates the fundamental premise of Wilkins’s project: before a universal language could be devised, the things and concepts represented by language first had to be systematically classified.

Large folding table#2 55×46 p443: “A Summary of Directions, both for the CHARACTER and LANGUAGE.” This is Wilkins’s remarkable key to the operation of his system, showing how the categories of his universal classification are converted into both written “Real Characters” and pronounceable syllables. Genera, differences, and species are encoded through modifications of the basic signs and corresponding combinations of letters, while the lower portion incorporates grammatical forms, particles, pronouns, tenses, and other elements necessary for actual speech. The table effectively compresses Wilkins’s entire philosophical language into a single working diagram.

For Eco, however, Wilkins’s achievement also reveals the fundamental difficulty inherent in every attempt to create a perfect language. Before Wilkins could construct universal signs, he first had to construct a universal classification of the things those signs represented. His language therefore depended upon the assumption that reality itself could be divided into universally valid categories. From a modern semiotic perspective, this is precisely the fascinating problem: the proposed language does not simply describe the world but necessarily interprets and organizes it. Wilkins’s Essay consequently occupies an important place not only in the history of artificial and universal languages, but in the much larger history of the relationship between things, concepts, classifications, and signs—the territory that would later become central to semiotics.

Wilkins’s rational phonetic alphabet, p. 376: a constructed writing system derived from his analysis of human speech sounds, with a specimen of continuous text below.

Wing W2196, Lowndes 2922., Alston VII 290; ESTC R21115.

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