466 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO iS/O. 



think it impossible but that the organs of speech might be taught to observe 

 their due postures, though neither the eye behold their motion, nor the ear 

 discern the sound they make. 



And as to the other ; that of language might seem yet more possible. For 

 as in children, every day, the knowledge of words, with their various con- 

 structions and significations, is by degrees attained by the ear, so that, in a 

 few years, they arrive to a competent ability of expressing themselves in their 

 first language, at least as to the more usual parts and notions of it ; why should 

 it be thought impossible, that the eye (though with some disadvantage) might 

 as well apply such complication of letters or other characters, to represent the 

 various conceptions of the mind ; as the ear, a like complication of sounds ? For 

 though, as things are, it be very true that letters are, with us, the immediate 

 characters of sounds, as those sounds are of conceptions : yet is there no reason, 

 in the nature of the thing itself, why letters and characters might not as pro- 

 perly be applied to represent immediately, as by the intervention of sounds, 

 what our conceptions are. 



Which is so great a truth, that it is practised every day, not only by the 

 Chinese, whose whole language is said to be made up of such characters as to 

 represent things and notions, independent of the sound of words ; and is there- 

 fore differently spoken, by those who differ not in the writing of it : like as 

 what, in figures, we write, 1, 2, 3, for one, two, three; a Frenchman, for 

 example, reads un, deux, trots : But, in part, also amongst ourselves ; as in the 

 numeral figures now mentioned, and many other characters of weights and 

 metals, used indifferently by divers nations to signify the same conceptions, 

 though expressed by a different sound of words : And more frequently, in the 

 practice of specious arithmetic, and operations of algebra, expressed in such 

 symbols, as so little need the intervention of words to make known their mean- 

 ing, that, when different persons come to express, in words, the sense of those 

 characters, they will as little agree on the same words, though all express the 

 same sense, as two translators of one and the same book into another language* 

 And though I will not dispute the practical possibility of introducing an uni- 

 versal character, in which all nations, though of different speech, shall express 

 their common conceptions; yet, that some two or three (or more) persons may, 

 by consent, agree upon such characters, whereby to express each to other their 

 sense in writing, without attending the sound of words ; is so far from an im- 

 possibility, that it must needs be allowed to be very feasible, if not easy. And 

 if it may be done by new-invented characters, why not as well by those already 

 in use ? Which though to those who know their common use, may signify 

 sounds ; yet to those that know it not, or do not attend it, may be as immedi 



