Species and the Birth of Modern Science 69
Bacon was followed by René Descartes (1596–1650), who proposed that an arti-
cial language could be constructed on the true divisions of nature (in his letters),
but the work of the linguist John Amos Comenius (1592–1670) in Janua linguarum
researata (1631) and Janua linguarum researata vestibulum (1633) made a start at a
universal language answering to all things. In later work he expanded the scope of
this project, and he had unrealized plans foran inductive history in which all things all things, which have ever been exactly
observed and proved beyond all possibility of mistake to be true, are faithfully col-
lected and set before our eyes; so that by an adequate examination of each one and
by comparison of one with another the Universal Laws themselves of Nature may be
brought within our knowledge.^96Descartes tried unsuccessfully to engage the botanist and polymath Joachim Jung
(1587–1657) to edit his works. Other universal language projectors included Samuel
Hartlib, Theodore Haak, Francis Lodowyck, Cave Beck, Francis Van Helmont,
George Dalgarno, Athanasius Kircher, Johann Joachim Becher, Seth Ward, and vari-
ous others involved in the nascent Royal Society at Cambridge.^97
One contributor, one might say the zenith, of the universal language project was
Bishop John Wilkins (1614–1672). My namesake was the brother-in-law of Oliver
Cromwell and is widely regarded as the founder of the Royal Society,^98 of which
he was the rst Secretary. He produced An essay towards a real character and a
philosophical language (1668), the only long-standing in uence of which is said to
have been the foundation of the scheme for Roget’s Thesaurus (and the occasion for
a Borges essay). In fact, Wilkins’ scheme was not so much a universal language as
a kind of indexical classi cation of concepts of his time (which, in typical style for
the time and since, he thought to be universally true of the entire human condition),
where words were in fact unique keys to each conceptual “address.” He managed to
engage (for money) a naturalist by the name of John Ray to produce a table of species
according to his own a priori categories. Ray felt that this a priori scheme was too con-
strictive, but according to Raven it did provide him with a motivation to do better in
his later publications.^99 Ray also translated the Essay into Latin, and remained a close
friend to Wilkins until his untimely death from kidney stones, despite his objections
to the underlying philosophy of the project. The Latin edition was never published.^100
Out of the neo-Platonic resources of the Cambridge Platonists and the Universal
Language Project, the transition was begun to an autonomous program of biological
classi cation. This heritage had two opposing aspects. First, as we have seen, there
was the history of species as the sharp categories of a top-down classi cation. The
other, via Descartes and Leibniz, was the Great Chain of Being notion of continu-
ous gradation from simpler forms to more complex. Ironically, both of these develop
ideas nascent or explicit in Aristotle’s writings. Lovejoy writes:(^96) Quoted by Slaughter 1982, p102f.
(^97) Rossi 2000.
(^98) Wright Henderson 1910, Wilkins 1970, Slaughter 1982.
(^99) Raven 1986, 182f, 192.
(^100) Clauss 1982.