certain wise kings, priests, and philosophers had put their heads together and decreed that certain conceptions should be labelled and ticketed with certain sounds. In that case we might speak of the sound as the outside, of the ideas as the inside of language; and no objection could be raised to our treating each of them separately.

Why it is impossible to conceive of living human language as having originated in a conventional agreement, I endeavored to explain in one of my former lectures. But I should by no means wish to be understood as denying the possibility of framing some language in this artificial manner, after men have once learnt to speak and to reason. It is the fashion to laugh at the idea of an artificial, still more of a universal language. But if this problem were really so absurd, a man like Leibniz would hardly have taken so deep an interest in its solution. That such a language should ever come into practical use, or that the whole earth should in that manner ever be of one language and one speech again, is hard to conceive. But that the problem itself admits of a solution, and of a very perfect solution, cannot be doubted.

As there prevails much misconception on this subject, I shall devote part of this lecture to a statement of what has been achieved in framing a philosophical and universal language.

Leibniz, in a letter to Remond de Montmort, written two years before his death, expressed himself with the greatest confidence on the value of what he calls his Spécieuse Générale, and we can hardly doubt that he had then acquired a perfectly clear in

sight into his ideal of a universal language.1 "If he succeeded," he writes, "in stirring up distinguished men to cultivate the calculus with infinitesimals, it was because he could give palpable proofs of its use; but he had spoken to the Marquis de L'Hôpital and others, of his Spécieuse Générale, without gaining from them more attention than if he had been telling them of a dream. He ought to be able, he adds, to support his theory by some palpable use; but for that purpose he would have to carry out a part of his Characteristics, no easy matter, particularly circumstanced as he then was, deprived of the conversation of men who would encourage and help him in this work."

A few months before this letter, Leibniz spoke with perfect assurance of his favorite theory. He admits the difficulty of inventing and arranging this philosophical language, but he maintains that, if once carried out, it could be acquired by others without a dictionary, and with comparative ease. He should be able to carry it out, he says, if he were younger and less occupied, or if young men of talent were by his side. A few eminent men might complete the work in five years, and within two years they might bring out the systems of ethics and metaphysics in the form of an incontrovertible calculus."

Leibniz died before he could lay before the world the outlines of his philosophical language, and many even among his admirers have expressed their doubts whether he ever had a clear conception of the nature of such a language. It seems hardly compatible, however, with the character of Leibniz to suppose

1 Guhrauer, G. W. Freiherr von Leibnitz, 1846, vol. i. p 328.

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that he should have spoken so confidently, that he should actually have placed this Spécieuse Générale on a level with his differential calculus, if it had been a mere dream. It seems more likely that Leibniz was acquainted with a work which, in the second half of the seventeenth century, attracted much attention in England, "The Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language," 1 by Bishop Wilkins (London, 1668), and that he perceived at once that the scheme there traced out was capable of much greater perfection. This work had been published by the Royal Society, and the author's name was so well known as one of its founders, that it could hardly have escaped the notice of the Hanoverian philosopher, who was in such frequent correspondence with members of that society.

Now, though it has been the fashion to sneer at Bishop Wilkins and his Universal Language, his work seems to me, as far as I can judge, to offer the best solution that has yet been offered of a problem which, if of no practical importance, is of great interest from a merely scientific point of view; and though it is impossible to give an intelligible account of the Bishop's scheme without entering into particulars which will take up some of our time, it will help us, I believe, towards a better understanding of real language, if we can acquire a clear idea of what an artificial language would be, and how it would differ from living speech.

The primary object of the Bishop was not to in

1 The work of Bishop Wilkins is analyzed and criticised by Lord Monboddo, in the second volume of his Origin and Progress of Language Edinburgh, 1774.

vent a new spoken language, though he arrives at that in the end, but to contrive a system of writing or representing our thoughts that should be universally intelligible. We have, for instance, our numerical figures, which are understood by people speaking different languages, and which, though differently pronounced in different parts of the world, convey everywhere the same idea. We have besides such signs as + plus, minus, X to be multiplied, ÷ to be divided, = equal, < greater, > sinaller, O sun, moon, earth, Jupiter, Saturn, & Mars,

Venus, &c., which are intelligible to mathematicians and astronomers all over the world. "Now if to everything and notion," — I quote from Bishop Wilkins (p. 21)," there were assigned a distinct mark, together with some provision to express grammatical derivations and inflections, this might suffice as to one great end of a real character, namely, the expression of our conceptions by marks, which shall signify things, and not words. And so, likewise, if several distinct words (sounds) were assigned to the names of such things, with certain invariable rules. for all such grammatical derivations and inflections, and such only as are natural and necessary, this would make a much more easy and convenient language than is yet in being."

This suggestion, which, as we shall see, is not the one which Bishop Wilkins carried out, has lately been taken up by Don Sinibaldo de Mas, in his Idéographie.1 He gives a list of 2600 figures, all formed

Idéographie. Mémoire sur la possibilité et la facilité de former une écriture générale au moyen de laquelle tous les peuples puissent s'entendre mutuellement sans que les uns connaissent la langue des autres; écrit par

after the pattern of musical notes, and he assigns to each a certain meaning. According to the interval in which the head of such a note is placed, the same sign is to be taken as a noun, an adjective, a verb, or an adverb. Thus the same sign might be used to express love, to love, loving, and lovingly, by simply moving its head on the lines and spaces from f to e, d, and c. Another system of signs is then added to express gender, number, case, person, tense, mood, and other grammatical categories, and a system of hieroglyphics is thus formed, by which the author succeeds in rendering the first 150 verses of the Æneid. It is perfectly true, as the author remarks, that the difficulty of learning his 2000 signs is nothing in comparison with learning several languages; it is perfectly true, also, that nothing can exceed the. simplicity of his grammatical notation, which excludes by its very nature everything that is anomalous. The whole grammatical framework consists of thirty-nine signs, whereas, as Don Sinibaldo remarks, we have in French 310 different terminations for the simple tenses of the ten regular conjugations, 1755 for the thirty-nine irregular conjugations, and 200 for the auxiliary verbs, a sum total of 2165 terminations, which must be learnt by heart.1 It is perfectly true, again, that few persons would ever use more than 4000 words, and that by having the same sign used throughout as noun, verb, adjective, and adverb, this number might still be considerably reduced. There is, however, this fundamental difficulty, that the assignment of a certain sign to a cer

Don Sinibaldo de Mas, Envoyé Extraordinaire et Ministre Plénipotentiaire de S. M. C. en Chine. Paris: B. Duprat, 1863.

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