Introduction: The Mirror of Information in Early Modern England
In his introduction, Fleming establishes the real or universal character movement of seventeenth-century England as the main target of his historical investigation. He also outlines the hypothesis of a phenomenological comparison between period technologi
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Introduction: The Mirror of Information in Early Modern England
In Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Jonathan Swift imagines a truly objective discourse: An Expedient was therefore offered, that since Words are only Names for Things, it would be more convenient for all Men to carry about them, such Things as were necessary to express a particular Business they are to discourse on. And this Invention would certainly have taken Place, to the great Ease as well as Health of the subject, if the Women in conjunction with the Vulgar and Illiterate, had not threatened to raise a Rebellion, unless they might be allowed the Liberty to speak with their Tongues, after the manner of their Ancestors; such constant irreconcileable Enemies to Science are the common People. However, many of the most Learned and Wise adhere to the New Scheme of expressing themselves by Things, which hath only this Inconvenience attending it, that if a Man’s Business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged in Proportion to carry a greater Bundle of Things upon his Back, unless he can afford one or two strong Servants to attend him. I have often beheld two of those Sages almost sinking under the Weight of their Packs, like peddlers among us; who when they met in the Streets, would lay down their Loads, open their Saddles and hold Conversation for an Hour together .
This book is about an early-modern method for communicating via things. Not, to be sure, in quite the manner of Swift’s famous satire.1 But some of the “most learned and wise” of the seventeenth century did imagine replacing human languages with a much more efficient and objective kind of intensional notation. For Bacon, Mersenne, Leibniz and others, the © The Author(s) 2017 J.D. Fleming, The Mirror of Information in Early Modern England, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40301-4_1
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hallmarks of all human languages were inaccuracy, redundancy, ambiguity, and unreliability. Words distorted thought, impeded communication, and prevented knowledge. Yet the mind, prior to language, seemed to reflect the world; much as a mirror reflects the face that is before it. Therefore (it was thought), if you could craft a symbolism to reflect the mind’s reflections—without falling back into “language”—you would, effectively, have a way of denoting things directly. This would be what the period called a real character: “real” from Latin res, thing. Writing down the notions of the mind, if that were possible, would amount to writing down the truth of the world.2 For Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), it offered only a way to write down a joke. But then, Swift found much that was funny, when he looked back on his own era. The Academy of Lagado, visited by Gulliver in the famous episode quoted above, clearly satirizes the Royal Society for the Improving of Natural Knowledge, founded in London in 1663. As a pioneering institution of what we now call natural science, the Royal Society looks to Swift like an easy target for satire. A measure of the historical distance between him and us. More recent
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