Through a Glass, Literally: From Shorthand to Wilkins’s Essay

Abstract

Here Fleming explains how Wilkins’s Essay, the masterwork of the real-character movement, grew directly out of the earlier shorthand-character movement. He tells the story of George Dalgarno, the obscure Scottish schoolmaster whose innovations in shorthand provided the basis for Wilkins’s work—turning “literal” characters, referring to words, into “real” or “universal” ones, referring (it was felt) directly to things. Fleming explains and examines the widespread seventeenth-century assumption that minds reflect the world directly, and that minds the world over reflect it in the same way. This simple epistemology, which Fleming calls the speculative view, provides the basis for the idea of real characters. Signs that referred to the notions of the mind would by that token refer directly to things, avoiding the confusions and distortions of language. A character, moreover, does not count as a language, in early-modern terms—and not in modern or postmodern ones, either.