In the attempt to make good one of the desiderata in Bacon's
Advancement of Learning, a cohort of seventeenth-century
philosophers, scientists, schoolmasters, clergymen and virtuosi
attempted to devise artificial languages that would immediately
represent the order of thought. This was believed directly to
represent the order of things and to be a universal characteristic
of the human mind. Language, Mind and Nature is a 2007 text which
fully reconstructs this artificial language movement. In so doing,
it reveals a great deal about the beliefs and activities of those
who sought to reform learning in seventeenth-century England.
Artificial languages straddle occult, religious and
proto-scientific approaches to representation and communication,
and suggest that much of the so-called 'new philosophy' was not
very new at all. This study broke important ground within its
field, and will interest anyone concerned with early modern
intellectual history or with the history of linguistic thought in
general.