II. THE CRITIQUE OF
LINGUISTIC INNATISM
The debt to Bacon of seventeenth-century linguistic
speculation has been stressed by Richard Foster Jones,
who has shown how from the Baconian “distrust of
language” there descends that opposition of word to
thing, of philological science to experimental science,
which is amply documented in the scientific and
didactic writings of the time. Within this general
framework, with this general posture of mind, linguistic
speculation addresses itself to its particular problems.
Unquestionably the root problem is the problem of the
origin and nature of language. The conventionalist
thesis, generally accepted in entirety, manifests itself
in the first half of the century as confutation of linguis-
tic innatism, as confutation of the idea of a natural lan-
guage, innate, created by and in the logos, which
reveals itself both in the primordial language of hu-
manity and in the astrological signs, and is the common
cipher of macrocosm and microcosm. This idea of a
“language of nature” had been strengthened, doubtless,
by the wide diffusion (following perhaps in the wake
of the magical Platonism of Robert Fludd) of typical
expositions of the mysticism of the Logos: the Philo-
sophia occulta of Cornelius Agrippa (translated into
English in 1650) and the writings of Jacob Boehme (all
of them translated into English between 1623 and
1661). The most devoted interpreter of this idea, in
England, is John Webster, author of an Academiarum
examen (London, 1654), a criticism of academic learn-
ing in which Baconian themes interlace with themes
drawn from Renaissance Platonism and from Rosicru-
cian doctrine. Unlike institutional language, which is
“acquisitive,” says Webster, the language of nature is
“dative”; it is the “mystical Idiome” which reveals
itself in “heavenly Magick” and is understood by all
creatures save “sinfull man who hath now lost, defac't
and forgotten it” and has superimposed upon it his
institutional languages (pp. 26-32).
This idea of a language of nature is challenged in
Vindiciae academiarum (Oxford, 1654), Seth Ward's
reply to Webster. Condemning in general the “Rosy-
crucian Rodomontados” of his adversary, Ward says
among other things that the universal language, which
Cabalists and Rosicrucians—these “credulous Fanatick
Reformers”—have vainly sought in Hebrew and in the
mythical language of Adam, will be rather the outcome
of science, which will make possible the construction
of a language—conventional, even artificial—founded
on an analysis of ideas and capable therefore of an
exact mirroring of them (pp. 18-23). The idea of an
innate language had already been confuted by John
Wilkins (Mercury [1641], in The Mathematical and
Philosophical Works, London [1708], I, 1-2) with an
argument that was to be picked up by other authors,
for example by George Sibscota (The Deaf and Dumb
Mans Discourse, London [1670], pp. 23-25):
... as Nature made Man without Knowledge that he may
be capable of all the Arts,... she created him without
any Language, that he may learn them all.
But the most radical challenge of the idea of an
original privileged language is to be found in Thomas
Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], English Works, ed. W.
Molesworth, III, 18-19; Logic [1655], English Works,
I, 16). It may be that Adam learned a few names
directly from God; but for the Adamic language in
general the rule holds, as for all human languages,
where the act of naming proceeds Pari passu with ex-
perience and the need to communicate. The Adamic
language too, accordingly, must have been arbitrary.
The denial of an innate and privileged character of
the Adamic language does not, however, mean denial
of the doctrine of the monogenesis of languages. The
idea of a primordial linguistic unity of the human race
is universally accepted. But almost all writers agree
on the impossibility of recovering or reconstructing the
primeval language with the tools of philology (etymo-
logical research, comparative study of languages, etc.).
This is the thesis of Wilkins (An Essay towards a Real
Character and a Philosophical Language, London
[1668], pp. 2-5); of Matthew Hale (The Primitive Orig-
ination of Mankind, London [1677], pp. 163-65); of
William Wotton (Discourse concerning the Confusion
of Languages [1713], London [1730], pp. 6-15), to
mention only a few examples.
