Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy (Ideas in Context)

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L O C K E , L A N G U A G E A N D EA R L Y - M O D E R N PHILOSOPHY

In a powerful and original contribution to the history of ideas, Hannah Dawson explores the intense preoccupation with language in earlymodern philosophy, and presents a groundbreaking analysis of John Locke’s critique of words. By examining a broad sweep of pedagogical and philosophical material from antiquity to the late seventeenth century, Dr Dawson explains why language caused anxiety in writers such as Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Gassendi, Nicole, Spinoza, Pufendorf, Boyle, Malebranche and Locke. Locke, Language and EarlyModern Philosophy demonstrates that new developments in philosophy, in conjunction with weaknesses in linguistic theory, resulted in serious concerns about the capacity of words to refer to the world, the stability of meaning, and the duplicitous power of words themselves. Dr Dawson shows that language so fixated all manner of early-modern authors because it was seen as an obstacle to knowledge and society. She thereby uncovers a novel story about the problem of language in philosophy, and in the process reshapes our understanding of early-modern beliefs about nature, epistemology, morality and politics. hannah dawson is Lecturer in Intellectual History at the University of Edinburgh.

I D E A S I N CO N T E X T 7 6

Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy

IDEAS IN C ONTE XT

Edited by Quentin Skinner and James Tully

The books in this series will discuss the emergence of intellectual traditions and of related new disciplines. The procedures, aims and vocabularies that were generated will be set in the context of the alternatives available within the contemporary frameworks of ideas and institutions. Through detailed studies of the evolution of such traditions, and their modification by different audiences, it is hoped that a new picture will form of the development of ideas in their concrete contexts. By this means, artificial distinctions between the history of philosophy, of the various sciences, of society and politics, and of literature may be seen to dissolve. The series is published with the support of the Exxon Foundation. A list of books in the series will be found at the end of the volume.

LOCKE, LANGUAGE AND EARLY-MODERN PHILOSOPHY HANNAH DAWSON

University of Edinburgh

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521852715 © Hannah Dawson 2007 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2007 eBook (EBL) ISBN-13 978-0-511-28894-4 ISBN-10 0-511-28894-8 eBook (EBL) hardback ISBN-13 978-0-521-85271-5 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-85271-4

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

for Joy Denyer

Contents

Acknowledgements

page x

Notes on the text

xii

Introduction part i

1

language in the trivium

11

1 Language in logic

13

2 Language in grammar

41

3 Language in rhetoric

64

part ii philosophical developments of the problem of language 4 The relationships between language, mind and word

89 91

5 Semantic instability: a containable threat

129

6 Under cover of sensible and powerful words

154

part iii

locke on language

183

7 Words signify ideas alone

185

8 Semantic instability: an inherent imperfection

210

9 A life of their own

239

10 Locke in the face of language

277

Bibliography Index

305 349 ix

Acknowledgements

A number of friends and institutions have helped me write this book and it is an enormous pleasure to acknowledge them here. In the first place, I am indebted to the British Academy Arts and Humanities Research Board for funding the PhD out of which the book arises, and to Christ’s College, Cambridge, for the sunlit home in which I wrote much of the thesis. I am also indebted to Queens’ College, Cambridge, for the junior research fellowship, the top-floor rooms and the stimulating interdisciplinary culture which facilitated the conversion of thesis to book. I thank the librarians of the British Library, of Cambridge University Library and of Duke Humfrey’s Library, for their good humour and professionalism. In the production of this book, Cambridge University Press has been brilliant. The reports by their anonymous readers were exceptionally useful, and I have done my best to incorporate their suggestions. A˚sa So¨derman has been a wonderful copy-editor, at once sensitive and astute. Jackie Warren has been both tolerant and helpful. And as for Richard Fisher, it has been a pure delight to get to know at first hand his legendary unfailing cheer and consummate efficiency. His patience and compassion have gone beyond the call of duty and I am forever obliged to him. In ways that are too various to enumerate here, but that involve kindness, conversation, criticism, books, bibliographies and laughter, I am hugely grateful to the following scholars: John Allison, Terence Ball, Richard Bourke, Brendan Bradshaw, Leo Cadogan, Daniel Carey, Janet Coleman, David Cram, Emma Gilby, Angus Gowland, Mark Goldie, Lilja Gretarsdottir, Lena Halldenius, James Harris, Ross Harrison, Susan James, Natalie Kaoukji, Sachiko Kusukawa, Cees Leijenhorst, Rhodri Lewis, Ian Maclean, Noel Malcolm, Ian Mcbride, Murray Milgate, Craig Muldrew, Jim Murphy, Eric Nelson, Ian Patterson, William Poole, Richard Rex, John Rogers, Sami Savonius, Richard Scholar, David Sedley, Sandy Stewart and Richard Yeo. x

Acknowledgements

xi

I am especially grateful to Annabel Brett, who introduced me to the rewards of intellectual history, whose perception and support over the years have awed and nourished me, and whose answers to my questions never fail to the hit the mark. I would also like to single out John Dunn, who continues to bring Locke into focus for me. I owe serious debts to those generous citizens who took time to read parts, or even all, of the book, and whose incisive comments enabled me both to clarify my arguments and to avoid some (doubtless not all) embarrassment: Stefan Collini, Sandra Dawson, Vlad Eatwell, Rebecca Langlands, Richard Serjeantson and Tristram Stuart. Michael Moriarty and Jim Tully examined my PhD, and I cannot thank them enough for their scrupulous observations, their transformative enthusiasm and, most of all, the imagination they brought to bear on my work, opening my eyes to its wider implications and setting me on a new path. It is difficult to find words adequate to express my greatest debt. With generosity, readiness and heart-warming optimism, Quentin Skinner has scrutinised every draft of every chapter of this book, attending to both the particular and the general, wielding all the time his erudition and acuity. There is something magical about his power as a teacher: his clarity is infectious, his counsel is liberating, and his confidence brings one closer to being worthy of it. While one of the joys of academic existence is that colleagues are also friends and that the grim line between work and life is at best nonexistent, I want to end by thanking all those comrades from a slightly distinct sphere without whose sociability and tomfoolery I would have struggled to discern the point of anything. I thank in particular Vlad Eatwell, Henry, Sandra, Rebecca and Tom Dawson, and finally my grandma, Joy Denyer, to whom I dedicate this book with all my love. Queens’ College, Cambridge

Notes on the text

references I use the author-date system to refer to both primary and secondary materials. In the case of Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding, I also give the book, chapter and section references, in that order, to provide a clearer sense of where we are in the work. In facsimile editions of works where the editor’s pagination differs from the original, I cite the original pagination. In the case of Locke’s manuscripts, where his own pagination goes awry and the editors have added consistent numbering, I cite the editors’ pagination first, followed by Locke’s in brackets. transcription While, in the main, I preserve the spelling and punctuation of the texts cited in the bibliographies, I sometimes disrupt it in order to smooth out my prose. For example, I modernise early-modern orthographical traditions, such as the use of the long ‘s’. Very rarely, in order to integrate quotations into my sentences, I make a grammatical alteration to a word, for example ‘defrauded’ becomes ‘defrauds’. I thin out the profusion of capital letters and italics in early-modern works. translation When quoting from texts written in languages other than English, I use the translations cited. Where none are available or appropriate, I make my own. Where I disagree with the translation, or do not think it captures the force of the original, I supply the original words, sometimes suggesting an alternative translation.

xii

Introduction

Language was a problem for early-modern philosophers. Not only were a remarkable number of works devoted to the subject, but it intruded upon texts about nature, morality and politics. At a time when both the portrayal of reality and our access to that reality were being challenged, and when religious and political conflicts proliferated, language came to seem dangerously unhinged. It was supposed to reach out to the world and to mediate between men, but instead it barred the way.1 As perceptions of the natural and cultural worlds mutated and splintered, it was feared that language no longer mapped them. Yet language was not silent. Covering over the cracks in the semantic edifice, it told its own duplicitous story. It seemed to have a power of its own. Unfettered in practice by the forces that ought to have constrained it, it tore at knowledge and at the community. So pressing was the unease about language that when John Locke came to write his great work on human understanding, he felt impelled to include an entire book on words. This inclusion is even more surprising when one considers that the Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689) is recognisably a work of logic.2 Logics old and new had, in the main, treated ideas and words simultaneously, and even interchangeably, explaining how these simple units were gradually compounded by the mind in a process that culminated in chains of reasoning. Locke repeats this traditional trajectory from ideas to knowledge, but inserts a distinct treatment of words, therein delivering the most sustained, devastating and acute critique of language that his age produced. The aim of the present study is to show why he came to make this insertion and, more generally,

1

2

Early-modern philosophers generally speak of ‘men’, rather than ‘men and women’. In order to avoid anachronism or exculpation, I tend to maintain this usage. Locke effectively names it as such at its end (Locke 1975, p. 720 (iv.xxi.4)). It becomes clear that it was perceived as a logic by himself and contemporaries in his Correspondence (Locke 1976–89, iv, pp. 479 and 601–2; v, p. 351). See also Buickerood 1985, pp. 157–9, and Schuurman 2004, p. 2.

1

Locke, language and early-modern philosophy

2

why language came to be the object of such general disquiet among earlymodern philosophers. More precisely, this book does four things. First, it analyses the theories of language that were bequeathed to early-modern philosophers in obscure as well as canonical texts. Second, it uncovers the linguistic concerns and ambitions that these theories, in conjunction with certain epistemological and practical developments, provoked in philosophers. Third, with the framework of early-modern philosophy of language in place, it considers Locke’s intervention. It identifies the arguments that he was repudiating and amplifying, as well as those that he simply reiterated. Against the background of everyday assumptions, negative reactions and creative developments, the innovative force of Locke’s polemic is thrown into relief. The book ends with an assessment of the ramifications of Locke’s philosophy of language for his epistemological and political projects. While commentators have produced important work on Locke’s philosophy of language, they have often done so from a contemporary perspective, evaluating his answers to questions that preoccupy philosophers now. The principal debate has revolved around Locke’s fundamental linguistic thesis that words signify ideas.3 His critics retort that meanings cannot consist of private ideas. If they did, people would be able neither to communicate nor to refer to external things. His defenders exculpate him from the crime, variously arguing that he did not make such an obvious mistake. However, Locke could not have seen the original privacy of meaning as a mistake. It was obvious to him that meaning was primarily private. The entire point of words was to publicise ideas that would otherwise be hidden. This was a truism that Locke accepted without question and that made sense as part of a network of beliefs about God, man and the world. An understanding of Locke’s intellectual environment makes it clear that he was not interested in proving that words signify ideas; this was an uncontested fact. Moreover, by establishing what was taken for granted, one can unearth what Locke was saying that was new, and therefore the points he was actually trying to make. It turns out that Locke was in fact concerned to expose the desperate consequences that follow from the commonplace that words signify ideas. Ironically, these consequences touch on precisely the pitfalls of which commentators have declared him naively ignorant. That is to say, he worries that, given that words signify ideas, they are removed 3

For references to this debate see fn. 44, p. 219, chapter 8, below.

Introduction

3

from the world and obstruct communication. Situating Locke’s ideas in their context, therefore, captures his concerns rather than our own. We believe that, given that we communicate, meaning must be publicly accessible, and so we trawl the objective world and linguistic use for this elusive entity. We search for an exit from Locke’s ideational theory of meaning. But reading him in the light of our opinions erases his. We come at meaning from the opposite direction. Whereas we see meaning as working – with ease, it is sometimes said – from the outside in, for Locke it works – with difficulty – from the inside out. More generally, Locke’s linguistic theory has been flaunted and attacked as the exemplar of a representational model of language, whereby words stand in a representative relation to ideas and (perhaps, in some ways) to things. This ‘Lockean’ approach has been contrasted with the various nonrepresentational accounts that have flourished in the twentieth century. However, it turns out that, long before the howls began, Locke himself struggled with and owned up to the failings in the only linguistic paradigm that was avaliable to him. His immanent critique is testament not only to his acuity, but also to his intellectual courage and integrity.4 There are some commentators who have taken a historical approach to Locke’s philosophy of language, and to early-modern philosophy of language as a whole. However, historians tend to present Locke as ushering in a strikingly new way of words rather than developing old ones in a complex performance of debt and denial.5 More generally, scholarly attention has focused on the outstanding contributions to linguistic theory in the period, on the abundance of literature that explicitly and entirely pertained to language.6 In addition to these strange and mighty ships, I explore the waters that kept them afloat and the undercurrents 4 5

6

I am indebted to Jim Tully for making this clear to me. For interpretations of Locke’s novelty, see Cohen 1997, p. xxiv; Formigari 1998, p. 13; Padley 1985 and 1988, i, p. 352. Important exceptions to this discontinuous approach include Hacking (1975b) and Ashworth (1981), both of whom locate Locke in certain linguistic traditions. Ayers (1991) is a masterpiece that straddles philosophical and historical approaches to Locke’s epistemology and, within this, his philosophy of language. Ott (2004, pp. 13–21) brilliantly identifies the Hellenistic semiotic tradition to which Locke is indebted. He also evaluates Locke’s position from a contemporary perspective, and defends it against the attacks of Berkeley, Mill, Frege, Wittgenstein, Quine and Putnam. For my response to this book see Dawson 2004. References to this literature occur throughout the book. Among the significant contributions to the study of early-modern philosophy of language are: Aarsleff 1982; Bono 1995; Cave 1979; Chomsky 1966; Cohen 1977; Coudert 1978 and 1991; Demonet 1992; Elsky 1989; Fish 1971a and 1972; Formigari 1988 and 1993; Foucault 1970; Hacking 1975b; Katz 1981; Kessler and Maclean 2002; Knowlson 1975; Land 1986; Maclean 1992 and 2002; Markley 1993; Padley 1976, 1985 and 1988; Rossi 2000; Salmon 1972, 1988 and 1996; Slaughter 1982; Stillman 1995; Struever 1995; Skinner 1996; Vickers 1985; Waswo 1987.

4

Locke, language and early-modern philosophy

that affected their course. Taking account of the fluid, international republic of letters that connected philosophers across borders through migration and the circulation of correspondence, manuscripts and books, I cover English and European authors, especially French ones. As well as making significant additions to the subject of language, the French turn out to be particularly resonant with Locke. And, in addition to texts from the early-modern period, I study those from antiquity and the intervening years whose traces are so vivid in early-modern writing. Within this frame, I look at two kinds of source that have not received much attention from students of early-modern language movements. To recover quotidian assumptions about language, I turn to the textbooks that taught the three arts of language – grammar, logic and rhetoric. The trivium formed the bedrock of every gentle education. It embodied the received wisdom about the nature of words that philosophers would have learnt at school and university, and that they went on to rehearse, embellish and unpick. In order to uncover these reactions, I then turn to a wide range of books that are primarily occupied with subjects other than language, such as metaphysics, commonwealths and Scripture, but that nevertheless record the irresistible pressure of linguistic concern. I look, for example, at Descartes’ Le monde (written 1629–33; published 1664), Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670) and Pufendorf ’s De iure naturae et gentium (1672). In this small sample, the menace of language worms its way into discussions of light, republics and law. I investigate this kind of ubiquitous linguistic interference. Accordingly, when I come to Locke, I look not only at book iii of his Essay – the book that is entitled ‘of words’ and is so well known to historians of linguistics – but also at those parts of the Essay that are apparently not concerned with language, as well as the vast extent of his published and unpublished oeuvre. This use of all manner of philosophical texts delivers a more richly shaded, generally darker, picture of early-modern philosophy of language than that painted by those books which enthusiastically advertise their interest in language. In addition, these comments about language that spilled so plentifully and so anxiously on to the pages of early-modern philosophy tell us something that might otherwise be missed about the intimate relationship that was conceived between language and philosophy. One cannot grasp the full extent of contemporary linguistic concerns when they are abstracted from philosophy. Indeed, it seems to me that earlymodern philosophers were not so much concerned about language per se, except insofar as it obstructed philosophy and the better life that philosophy would bring.

Introduction

5

This brings me to the distinctive thrust of this book: that the earlymodern preoccupation with language originates from deep fears about the corruptible nature of words themselves – about their fragile relation to the concepts and things to which they were supposed to be fixed, and about their extraordinary power to disrupt truth and society. On the whole, commentators have tended to elucidate how language was conceived to work by Locke and his predecessors. We are told, for example, how Jacob Boehme believed that there was a divine natursprache that inherently contains knowledge of nature, or how John Wilkins believed that language can map the world essentially, albeit conventionally, or how Locke believed that words signify ideas. This may all be so, but it fails to register the anxiety that characterises so much early-modern treatment of language, that fuels so many of the reformatory plans with which we are familiar, and that pushes the subject into philosophy at large. By projecting on to early-modern linguistic thought our mission to discover how language works, we are easily blinded to the overriding source of its urgent energy: alarm that language did not work as it should. As established perceptions of man’s relations to the world and to his fellows were questioned, so too were the aptness, the stability and the strength of language. Language was both the agent of provocation and the victim of these unsettled perceptions. It was this complicated interaction of beliefs about the internal constitution of language and of changing philosophical positions that made language come to seem so threatening to natural, moral and political philosophers and to so encroach upon their writing. This book examines this volatile interaction. It tells a story about the problem of language in philosophy. In studying a wide range of texts, I want not only to achieve a fuller image of early-modern philosophy of language, but also to penetrate the early-modern usage which is foreign to us now. By moving back and forth between a wealth of texts, it gradually becomes possible differentially to decode the (unstable) meanings of key terms. From our point of view, the most vexed and important of these involve those entities that words are said to ‘signify’: ‘meaning’, ‘signification’, ‘sense’, ‘thing’ or ‘res’. By enveloping oneself in the cultural lexicon of early-modern speakers, one can begin to see things in their terms. One begins to shake off the modern presumption that meaning is in certain ways a function of the interplay of signs, that language and meaning are somehow made of the same stuff, or draw breath from the same source. One begins to internalise the radical disjunction between sign and signified which is axiomatic for earlymodern thinkers and key to understanding their linguistic solicitude.

6

Locke, language and early-modern philosophy

However, I am not simply concerned to give an impressionistic account of early-modern philosophy of language, one that juxtaposes an array of resemblances and aporias. I am also interested in recovering a history of the debate, in the strings of actions and reactions that constitute a dynamic conversation. Rather than merely unlocking what various writers thought that words meant, I track a narrative of the shifting semantic ground. I probe the responses of philosophers to what they read in the trivium, the quarrels and bequests that related these philosophers and the rejoinder that Locke gave to this debate. In establishing these associations, I note some of the connections that we know existed between authors, particularly in the case of Locke, whose manuscripts and library afford us access to his literary interests. However, the marks that writers leave on each other do not originate simply from the reading of books. In the self-consciously friendly and dialogical community of seventeenth-century philosophers, ideas were shared and developed off the page.7 Indeed, Locke is keen to tell us that the seed of his Essay was produced when ‘five or six friends meeting at my chamber’ were overwhelmed by the difficulties of philosophical inquiry.8 The trade in ideas was particularly active in a culture that positively encouraged gentlemen to copy wise dicta into their notebooks and to pepper their speech with them. The high value set on commonplaces promoted an intense and elusive exchange of identical beliefs. Moreover, just as language is overwhelmingly communal, so too are beliefs. Invented in the interstices between speakers, they are circulated, reinforced and contested. They make up that symbolic web which gives us voice. I take it, then, that one does not need explicit allusions or proven familiarity to justify relating texts to one other. The fact that Locke may well not have read, for example, Thomas Spencer’s Art of Logick, Delivered in the Precepts of Aristotle and Ramus (1628) does not mean that he was not familiar with the ideas represented there. Spencer declared that ‘by institution . . . the signification of words followes the intent of the speaker, and not otherwise’.9 It strikes me as legitimate to say that Locke was ‘repeating’ this view when he wrote: ‘that then which words are the marks of, are the ideas of the speaker: nor can any one apply them, as marks, immediately to any thing else, but the ideas, that he himself hath’.10 This is not to say that individuals are drowned by the discourses in which they move. They can 7 8 10

See Shapin and Shaffer 1985; Shapin 1994; Walmsley 1993. Locke 1975, p. 7 (Epistle to the Reader). 9 Spencer 1970, p. 154. Locke 1975, p. 405 (iii.ii.2).

Introduction

7

modify, challenge and invert the conceptual resources they are given. Indeed, it is crucial to my analysis that authors can act, particularly when I come to Locke’s shocking interruption. Treading a path, then, between intertextuality and authority, this book follows the ideas that led philosophers to fear language. Part i examines the mainstream beliefs about language that are imparted in the trivium. It is important to note that early-modrn philosophy of language is fundamentally a philosophy of words. While today we might focus more on sentences, and while concatenations of words were explored by early-modern writers, their primary unit of analysis was words, which were believed to signify something outside themselves. More particularly therefore, early-modern philosophy of language might often be characterised as a philosophy of names, whereby sounds are considered to be applied to, or to name, something extra-linguistic, such as a pelican, an emotion or a mental action such as negation. Drawing on and reinforcing this tradition, all three sister arts depict words as signs that, by convention – or semantic contract, as I shall call it – have one proper meaning. Meanings are thoughts that in turn, if one is talking about the external world, hook on to things. Following Aristotle, the mainspring of early-modern linguistic theory, these three units – words, thoughts and things – are presented as operating in harmonious and univocal synchrony. Indeed, they are so tightly joined that the spaces dividing them seem to disappear. Words are taken so straightforwardly to represent their meanings that they stand confidently alone, what they actually signify remaining concealed or unconsidered. Often, thoughts are subsumed by things, mental mediation eclipsed by a seemingly perfect realism. However, under the gaze of external critical eyes and the pressure of internal dissent, various aspects of the tripartite union threaten to unravel. I identify three concerns that are thus provoked and in part ii I follow the ways in which various philosophers address them. The first is about the relationship between language and the world. The fear is that words might not correspond to things as they really are, but pervert them instead. The new philosophers choke on the Aristotelian linguisticontological paradigm they had been fed by logicians. While some, particularly the Cartesians, replace it with equally ambitious accounts, others stress the unstoppable breach between words and the world. The second concern is about semantic instability, whereby the conventions that connect words to meanings are insecure, and whereby one word might have a plurality of meanings. Logical fallacies and, more dangerously,

8

Locke, language and early-modern philosophy

rhetoric had advertised and warmly embraced the ambiguous possibilities inherent in language. Reflecting on these, philosophers warn of the perils of free-floating words, particularly in the moral sphere. The third concern is that words might usurp the theoretically sovereign place of thoughts and things, and come to dominate the relationship. This danger had been both inadvertently broadcast by grammarians, who focused on the body rather than the soul of words, and shamelessly celebrated by rhetoricians, who taught the sweet and irresistible power of words. As a result of their supremacy, words might in fact stand for nothing at all. Moreover, they might belie the truth and write the natural and moral worlds in their own deceitful, but opaque, image. When Locke urged his readers, then, to consider well ‘the errors and obscurity, the mistakes and confusion, that is spread in the world by an ill use of words’, he was picking up a well-established refrain of earlymodern philosophers.11 Part iii investigates his intervention in their discussion. While keeping in mind the different circumstances and purposes that inform each of his different writings, I pursue the comments about language that run throughout them. Locke deepens each of his predecessors’ concerns, and, generally speaking, where they had often blamed speakers for the imperfection of words, Locke blamed words themselves, as well as their (un)knowing users. Provoked by overambitious and treacherous talk, influenced by critics of linguistic abuse, and thinking through revolutionary scientific and political developments, Locke makes his landmark case against language. In the context of the first concern that I have identified, he declares that we cannot know things in themselves, but only insofar as they affect our senses. Our talk about the external world is therefore bound to signify ideas alone (or rather, ideas and the fruits of our rational labour on them), and these bear no resemblance to the world. While this is basically a repetition of new (rationalist-) empiricist claims, Locke elaborately consolidates it through the filter of his distinctive epistemology. He also extracts the specifically linguistic implications of anti-Aristotelian mechanism from the epistemological ones with which they had generally been run together, and thereby gives them an original prominence and particularity. The second concern, about semantic instability, had not been nearly so developed by Locke’s predecessors. The ambiguous use of words had generally been characterised as a clearly identifiable, preventable misdemeanour. The breach of linguistic conventions had been conceived as avoidable, as caused by 11

Locke 1975, pp. 509–10 (iii.xi.4).

Introduction

9

the deliberate malice of men who wanted to subvert truth, justice and peace. Locke’s reply was that people inevitably, innocently and most of the time, mean different things by the same words, particularly moral ones. They therefore do not communicate about matters of the utmost importance. The application of his theory of ideas to language leads him to conclude that we actively construct the complex meanings of the great majority of our words. They are therefore bound to differ from person to person in accordance with differences of experience and belief. This calls into question the very existence of common use. Locke firms up the third concern by systematically laying out the sensible autonomy of words and their great allure to our sensuous minds. In themselves, words are sounds and squiggles that enter and fix in our minds with far more ease than their ephemeral and complicated meanings. Words therefore dominate in cognition as well as in communication. Their palpable and singular presence conceals the unreal and multiple nature of meaning, with the result that people mistakenly imagine that their words are a mirror both of reality and of other people’s minds. Moreover, people often speak words that they either do not understand or that have no meaning to speak of. Locke fears that the impressive fac¸ade of words fills our heads and tells its own tales. While our semantic handiwork is fissile and full of holes, our words instruct us otherwise. His treatment of language is a plea for us to realise the limitations and imperfections of the meanings of our words and their intractable presence in private and interpersonal experience. I conclude by asking how Locke’s critique of language might cause us to re-read the theorist of human understanding and of politics with whom we are perhaps more familiar. The answer is potentially devastating. Locke’s fears about the embodied power of language threaten to dim the light of knowledge. By infecting men with erroneous and empty discourse and by encouraging them to pretend to a greater intelligence than they can ever have, language threatens both the judgement that establishes political legitimacy and the precious policy of toleration. Moreover, Locke’s apprehension about the loose ties that bind words to ideas challenges both the trust and the unity that gives life to civil society. Locke’s pessimistic account of language turns out to subvert, if not obviate, crucial ambitions of his philosophy.

part 1

Language in the trivium

chap te r 1

Language in logic

Of the three arts of language, logic offers the most fundamental analysis of the subject. It deals most directly with meaning, that is, with the concepts and the things that words represent. It is for this reason that, while grammar comes first in the trivium, I begin with the second sister and her revelation of the heart of language. Logic is an instrument for sound reasoning, and is often presented as yielding truth. At the end of the seventeenth century, the discipline is still firmly shaped by the Aristotelian Organon, but it is not a monolith.1 Its scholastic constitution, having been variously contested by humanist authors, is further developed by new philosophers from Bacon to Locke, whose Essay is an important contribution to the field.2 I have called upon 1

2

Aristotle’s Organon includes Categories, De interpretatione, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics and Sophistici Elenchi. This sketches what became the tripartite journey from terms to propositions to reasoning (demonstrative, probabilistic and fallacious) that shapes early modern logics. The concepts of ‘humanism’ and ‘scholasticism’ are to a great extent confused and modern fabrications, and often cannot be pulled apart, each drawing on identical or interwoven classical sources, and engaging in often indistinguishable practices. Insofar as one can discern a division of interests, these coincided peacefully in a unified curriculum. Having said that, these labels are useful shorthand for particular outlooks. I take ‘humanism’ to champion the studia humanitatis (grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy) and to be often concerned with textual criticism, temporality, probabilism, arguments in utramque partem (on both sides of a question) and the citizen orator. ‘Scholasticism’ is perhaps an even more problematic and all-encompassing term, denoting simply the culture of the ‘schools’ or universities. In addition though, I think of scholastics as having a particular preoccupation with logic, and especially with Aristotle and his tradition. Moreover, while early-modern Aristotelianism was plural, porous and vital, it is important to note the polemical, contemporary caricature of the ‘schoolman’ as enslaved to authority, splitting hairs and spinning webs of insignificant words. On humanism and the Renaissance as worthwhile categories see Kristeller 1979a and Skinner 2002b, pp. 1–3. On the close relationship of humanism to scholasticism see Kristeller 1979b; for a more antagonistic characterisation see Grafton and Jardine 1986, pp. xiii–xiv. On early-modern Aristotelianisms see Blackwell and Kusukawa 1999 and Mercer 1993. See Marenbon (1991) and Spade (1998) on late-medieval logic; Ashworth (1974) on logic in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Ashworth (1988) on ‘traditional’ logic in the Renaissance; Jardine (1988) on humanist transformations and logic’s ‘hybridisation’ (p. 174); Ong (1958) on the pedagogically motivated Agricolan–Ramist movement which reified the logical ontology; Rossi (2000) on the Neo-Platonist, especially Lullist, conversion of logic into an

13

14

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the disparate voices in this parade to retrieve basic and commonplace assumptions about language and meaning.

words as signs Words are universally characterised as signs. The Manuductio ad logicam (1614) by Philippe du Trieu, a Jesuit scholastic logic that Locke both possessed and recommended to his students at Christ Church, defines speech (oratio) as significant sound (vox significativa).3 A word is said to signify its ‘signification’ or ‘meaning’. These two terms are used interchangeably in early-modern English. For example, in his Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668), John Wilkins translates ‘meaning’, or that ‘which is intended by any . . . sound or character’, as ‘sense, signification’.4 I generally use these terms in the same way.5 ‘Signify’ is a rich term that is roughly equivalent to ‘indicate’ or ‘make known’.6 In his Ars logica (1632), John of St. Thomas makes more explicit the integral role that the human mind plays in signification, defining a

3 4

5

6

encyclopaedic key to the world; Malherbe (1990) on Bacon’s critique of logic; Nuchelmans (1998a, 1998b and 1998c) on seventeenth-century logic; Schurmann (2000), Easton (1997) and Buickerood (1985) on ‘new’ developments and Locke’s place within them. Howell, W. (1971, pp. 6–7) asserts that logic was transformed in an ‘intellectual revolution’ whose ‘hero’ was Locke. Du Trieu 1826, p. 89. See Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 252; Ashworth 1981, p. 304. For further examples, see Wilson 1553, fo. 8v: ‘ ‘‘nobles’’ signifie not onely the peers of a realme, but also thei are the good yelowe nobles in a mans purse . . . every one of these woordes have a double meanyng’ (my emphasis); Blount 1969, sig. P1r: ‘Entendment . . . signifies in our common law so much as the true meaning or signification of a word’; Kersey 1969, sig. R2v: ‘To mean’ is interpreted as ‘to purpose, to understand, or to signify’, and ‘signification’ translates as ‘meaning’; the title of John Cowell’s legal dictionary, which Locke both possessed and recommended for a gentleman’s reading (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 117; Locke 1997, p. 379) reads: The Interpreter or Book containing the Signification of Words, wherein is set forth the true meaning of all . . . ; Locke 1975, p. 422 (iii.iv.6): ‘the meaning of any term is then shewed, or the word is defined when by other words, the idea it is made the sign of, and annexed to in the mind of the speaker, is as it were represented, or set before the view of another; and thus its signification ascertained’; cf. p. 480 (iii. ix.9). See Ashworth (1981, pp. 309–11) on the difference between early-modern ‘signification’ and our sense of ‘meaning’; contrast Losonsky (1994, pp. 127–30), who argues for ‘some minimal, pretheoretical conception of meaning’ (p. 130) that, like water (p. 129), existed then as now, and was the object of Locke’s linguistic theory. Ott (2004, p. 28) makes an illuminating contribution to this debate, inviting us to think of ‘to mean’ as we do when we say that ‘puddles mean rain’. This makes sense of the claim that ‘words mean ideas’. It was Grice (1957) who brought attention to this ‘natural’ (as opposed to ‘nonnatural’) kind of meaning. Accordingly, I also use ‘semantic’ to capture this broad, early-modern conception of ‘meaning’ or ‘signification’, which shifts, as we shall see, between concepts, things or both. Occasionally, I import the modern categories of sense and reference to elucidate my argument. See Ott (2004, pp. 13–21) on the ‘indicative’ tradition; Ashworth (1974, pp. 39–41, and 1984, pp. 60–2) on the ‘making known’ tradition.

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sign as ‘that which represents something other than itself to a knowing power’.7 He goes on to explain that there are two types of sign. Formal signs signify immediately and of themselves, and include concepts whose very nature is to represent things. Then there are instrumental signs. These do not intrinsically signify and are themselves distinct objects of sensation.8 Words fall into this category. While different philosophers had proposed different and incommensurable typologies of signs over the years, all agree that verbal signs are quintessentially sensible (audible or visible) and signify something absolutely distinct from themselves. Augustine advertises the sensible aspect of words. He defines a sign, of which a word is a species, as, in a respectful quotation of John of St. Thomas, ‘something which, besides the impression that it conveys to the sense, makes something come into cognition’.9 The Port-Royal’s enormously influential La logique, ou, l’art de penser (1662) by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, owned and applauded by Locke, repeats Augustine’s claim that ‘for an uttered or written sound to signify is nothing other than to prompt an idea connected to this sound in the mind by striking our ears or eyes’.10 Words must be sensible to manifest things that would otherwise be hidden. Thomas Hobbes gives a strong account of the intrinsic sensibility of words. In addition to requiring sensible signs to communicate insensible things, he says that we need them to remember, and even to think. In his Computatio sive logica (1655), better known as De corpore, he distinguishes two functions of language. One is the familiar, communicative one. The other is mnemonic. It involves notae, or ‘sensible things employed by our own decision, so that at the sensation of these things, thoughts can be recalled to the mind, similar to those thoughts for the sake of which they were

7

8 9

10

John of St. Thomas 1985, p. 116. See Murphy (1994) for an account of John of St. Thomas’ semiotics; Murphy (1991) for a criticism of John’s division between natural and habituated signification. Deely (1985) argues that John of St. Thomas is part of a ‘radical . . . semiotic enterprise’ in which Locke is also involved (p. 514). See also MS. Stowe 990, fo. 162r on the distinction between formal and instrumental signs. John of St. Thomas 1985, p. 116. Ott (2004, p. 14) argues for an opposition between the ‘indicative’ Augustinian tradition and the ‘expressing’ or ‘making known’ scholastic tradition that Ashworth describes. However, while these traditions did have rival understandings of non-verbal signs, they broadly agreed on the nature of words. For example, John of St. Thomas (1985, p. 27), a scholastic supposedly at the heart of Ott’s opposing camp, agreed that linguistic signs are instrumental. A similar debate over the essence of a sign is conducted in the Coimbra commentaries on Aristotle, a text which, as E. J. Ashworth shows, was recommended for young scholars by Thomas Barlow, librarian of the Bodleian in 1652–60, in a list which Locke copied into his commonplace book (Collegium Conimbricense 1610, pp. 292–4). Cf. Ashworth 1981, p. 304. Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 75; MS. Locke f. 3, p. 52; Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 66.

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summoned’.11 In private thought, then, as well as in public speech, the sensibility of words might be crucial. Another definitive characteristic of language is its conventionality. While a few early-modern writers loudly and mysteriously disagree on this point, most concur that the connection between words and meanings is arbitrary, purely contingent on human will, and agreed on by men through a semantic contract.12 In his popular Institutionum logicarum (1626) (top of the list of logics that Richard Holdsworth recommends to Cambridge undergraduates towards the middle of the seventeenth century), Franco Burgersdijk defines speech (interpretatio) as ‘a symbol made from articulate sound, signifying a concept of the mind by institution’.13 Lurking within the logicians’ conventionalist thesis is the possibility of instability and opacity. Reading against the grain of their frequent plea to speak ‘properly’, that is, in accordance with common use, we are alerted to the fact that sign and signified might come apart at will. The PortRoyalists urge that ‘we should accommodate ourselves to usage as much as possible’. They are upset by ‘chemists’ who ‘enjoy changing the names of most of the things they talk about’.14 Unless we speak ‘properly’, declares Burgersdijk, our words cannot be ‘perspicuous’.15 Only convention can make sounds transparent signs. Words are inherently opaque, and just as men join them to meanings, so might they separate them. The Coimbra commentary on Aristotle’s Dialectic (2nd edition 1610) brings out the ineliminable dualism of sign and signified. It distinguishes between the verbs ‘signify’ and ‘represent’. A representative is something that ‘makes the thing present’, whereas a sign causes something other than itself to come to mind.16 The radical division, only bridgeable by breakable convention, between meanings and intrinsically meaningless words was to seem to some a fragile base for communication. I now turn to the question of what words signify. Broadly speaking, logicians give two (sometimes overlapping) answers. The first posits a binary relationship between word and meaning, between sign and signification. The 11 12

13

14 16

Hobbes 1981, p. 12. Many commentators argue that the belief in (the possibility of ) naturally significant words was widespread. See, for example, Cope 1999, p. 57: ‘it must be realized that in Locke’s time, most people believed in natural connections between words and things’. See also Aarsleff 1982, pp. 42–83, and 1999; Bono 1995; Coudert 1978 and 1991; Foucault 1970. In contrast, Demonet (1992) demonstrates convincingly the overwhelming early-modern consensus, following Aristotle, that words are connected to their meanings arbitrarily. Holdsworth 1961, p. 634; Burgersdijk 1634, p. 142: ‘symbolum ex articulata voce factum, animi conceptus ex instituto significans’. Arnauld and Nicole 1996, pp. 64; 65. 15 Burgersdijk 1634, p. 142. Collegium Conimbricense 1610, pp. 295–7.

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terms verba and res are widely used to characterise this bisection.17 Burgersdijk puts an Aristotelian spin on the duality, stating that, if ‘man’ were defined materially it would be ‘one syllable’, if formally, it would be ‘animal’.18 The second answer to the question of what words signify is a triptych. In his hugely influential Systema logicae (1600), Bartholomaeus Keckermann declares that ‘a word is the sign of a thing and a concept’.19 In Samuel Smith’s Aditus ad logicam (1613), a textbook that Locke recommended to his students, a word is defined as ‘a sign of a thing and a concept’.20 In his Institutio logicae (1687), a textbook that Locke possessed, John Wallis writes that ‘speeches or words (either spoken or written) are names of things, and signs (or indications) of thoughts, or concepts of the mind’.21 As I shall show, logicians are generally committed to this tripartite paradigm, believing that words hook on to the mind and the world, and that these three elements somehow parallel each other. However, running uneasily and ubiquitously alongside this considered commitment, are simpler, careless stories. Logicians regularly switch between the two- and three- part accounts of language. Keckermann, for example, whom we saw voicing the linguistic triptych, also saw double, dividing words into two aspects: ‘material’ (sound or image) and ‘formal’ (signification).22 In this way, concept and thing become confused under the umbrella of res, and one of them tends to disappear. Most often, it is the mental component that is forgotten, words seeming to reach directly out to the world. Language seems to melt into reality as even the distinction between verba and res blurs, the one standing confidently for the other. The three elements dissolve into each other on the pages of the logics, as though there were no question of the plenitude of the letter. In the course of this book I shall unpack the unities that are conjured out of these semantic elisions. language reflects the mind I turn first to the conceptual plain of signification. Logicians portray language as the mirror of (ideally rational) thought. Indeed, at times ratio runs together with oratio to the extent that they become 17 19 20 21

22

For example, Clauberg 1658, sig. *4v. 18 Burgersdijk 1634, pp. 159–60. Keckermann 1600, sig. A4v: ‘vox est signum rei & conceptum’. Schuurman 2000, p. 53; Smith, Samuel 1656, p. 4: ‘vox est signum rei et conceptuum’. Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 262; Wallis 1687, p. 1: ‘voces seu verba (sive scripta sive prolata,) sunt Rerum Nomina, Signaque (seu indicia) cogitatuum, sive conceptuum mentis’. Keckermann 1600, sig. A5r.

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indistinguishable.23 This equivalence has its roots in the Greek word logos which, as well as giving its name to the discipline, balances between ‘reason and speech’, collapsing the two into each other.24 As Hobbes says, ‘the Greeks have but one word . . . for both Speech and Reason’.25 In his Introduction to the Art of Logick (1671), John Newton elaborates on the Greek derivation of the name of the art. Logos ‘signifieth speech, and according to Aristotle, speech is twofold, internal, and external. Internal speech he calleth that which is conceived in the mind: and he calleth external which is expressed by words.’26 Echoing Plato, Pierre Gassendi explains in his Institutio logica (the first part of his Syntagma philosophicum, 1658), that ‘logic . . . takes its name from the Greek word logos which means speech, since thinking is nothing else but an inner conversation which the mind holds with itself ’.27 In his Summa totius logicae Ockham had given a seminal account of the isomorphism between mental, spoken and written language: Language is threefold: written, spoken and conceptual. The last named exists only in the intellect. Correspondingly the term is threefold, viz. the written, the spoken and the conceptual term. A written term is part of a proposition written on some material, and is or can be seen with the bodily eye. A spoken term is part of a proposition uttered with the mouth and able to be heard with the bodily ear. A conceptual term is a mental content or impression which naturally possesses signification or consignification, and which is suited to be part of a mental proposition and to stand for (supponere) that which it signifies.28

The oratio mentalis is simply publicised by an external version of itself. Wallis echoes the parallel relationship between mental and verbal discourse when he characterises them as ‘internal’ and ‘external’ forms of the same thing.29 Thought is therefore discursive, identical in form, though not matter, to language. Robert Sanderson refers not so much to a relation of identity as of manifestation or translation. His Logicae artis compendium (1618) is an exemplar of the seventeenth-century ‘systematic’ movement 23

24 26 27 28

29

Hobbes (1969, p. 23) plays with the rhyme to jibe at insignificant speakers, such as beggars reciting the paternoster, for whom ‘ratio, now, is but oratio’. Although the two words are not etymologically related, early-modern philosophers mine the apparent continuity. 25 Wallis 1687, p. 1: ‘vox & Rationem significat & Orationem’. Hobbes 1996, p. 29. Newton 1671, p. 2. Gassendi 1981, p. 80. Cf. Plato (1928, p. 179): thought is ‘the talk which the soul has with itself ’. Ockham 1990, p. 47. Panaccio (1999b, p. 14) asserts that Ockham accomplished ‘une re´volution the´oretique majeure extreˆmement influente, par la mise au point pre´cise´ment de ce concept d’oratio mentalis’. Wallis 1687, p. 1. On mental language, see Ashworth 1974, p. 42; Ashworth 1982; Ashworth 1984, pp. 58–60; Spade 1980.

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that amalgamates scholasticism and Ramism.30 It was published at least ten times in the course of the century and is described by one commentator as the ‘most influential textbook of the seventeenth century’.31 Locke not only owned a copy but recommended the text to his students, although he would later, when his disdain for the logicians’ pretensions to describe the world had firmly crystallised, attack Sanderson, along with Burgersdijk, as the representatives of that ‘whole tribe of logicians’ who talked emptily.32 According to Sanderson, the ‘objects’ of logic are primarily the human mind (mens humana), and secondarily speech (oratio), which expresses the thoughts of the mind (sensa mentis).33 Burgersdijk sums up the coordination between speech and thought in the Synopsis of his Institutionum. Logic ‘signifies at once reason and speech. For logic directs the rational faculty, or concepts of our mind, and teaches them to translate into apt speech.’34 The mental-linguistic parallelism is developed into a narrative in three parts. Derived from Aristotle, it is represented here by the Coimbra commentary: ‘first it is right to define, what is a name, and a verb, then what is a negation, what an affirmation, what a proposition, and then what is discourse’.35 As Peter Berault’s Logic or the Key of Sciences (1690) puts it more succinctly: ‘the first part makes mention of the terms; the second of the proposition; and the third of the argumentation’. This trinity reflects three ‘actions of our spirit’: ‘to conceive, to judge, and to reason’.36 Speech and thought appear like synchronised swimmers. The basic dance goes as follows. At the first stage, the mind is almost passive and the concepts simple. While philosophers tell various complex stories about how the mind comes to have universal concepts, in the logics they generally appear fully formed, as singular and automatic.37 As Aristotle writes, ‘a noun or a verb by itself much resembles a concept or thought, which is neither combined nor disjoined’.38 Gassendi, the ‘empiricist’, 30

31 32 33 34

35

36 37

38

Howell (1961, p. 299) describes Sanderson as the ‘chief English Systematic’; cf. Nuchelmans 1998a, p. 104. On the systematic movement see Howell 1961, pp. 282–317. Feingold 1997, p. 297. Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 225; Ashworth 1981, p. 304; Locke 1706b, p. 192. Sanderson 1985, pp. 1–2. Burgersdijk 1668, p. 1: ‘tum rationem tum orationem significat. Logica enim dirigit intellectus nostri rationem, sive conceptus, eosque docet apta oratione interpretari’. Collegium Conimbricense 1610, p. 291: ‘Primo definire oportet, quidnam sit nomen, & quid verbum, deinde quid negatio, quid affirmatio, quid Enuntiatio, quid denique oratio sit.’ Berault 1690, p. 6. See Spruit (1994 and 1995) for a compendious survey of the ways in which the mind was thought to obtain the ‘intelligible species’ or essence of a thing from antiquity to the seventeenth century. Aristotle 1938b, p. 117; ‘resembles’ here does not indicate any natural connection between sign and signification. Charles (1994) argues that Aristotle has an account of the meaning of names which is midway between Frege and direct reference theory.

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calls the first cognitive procedure ‘imagination’.39 The Cartesian PortRoyalists call it ‘conception’, producing ideas, not ‘images painted in the fantasy’.40 As late as 1732, an account of ‘dialectica universa’ from Douay, lays down the first operation of the mind as ‘apprehension’ or ‘a simple perception’.41 While logicians traditionally and overwhelmingly deal with language and thought as two sides of the same coin, they sometimes conduct a discussion specifically about terms, often at the end of their first sections.42 It should be noted immediately that Locke’s book iii, which bridges his discussion of ideas in books i and ii and their agreement/ disagreement in book iv, bears the traces of this traditional logical structure, while at the same time challenging it. It should also be noted that while traditional logicians sometimes identify discrepancies between terms and concepts, these are presented as limited and manageable, and, more generally, the specific discussions of terms only elaborate more deeply on the parallelism between terms and concepts which permeates the discipline. Logicians (Locke included) distinguish between, for example, simple and complex, concrete and abstract, ‘connotative’ and ‘absolute’, and univocal and equivocal terms – distinctions that Locke will transform and sometimes collapse almost out of all recognition.43 Perhaps the most important division at this point in the present study is betwen categorematic and syncategorematic terms. The former signify the objects of thought, such as ‘homo, animal’, and the latter the actions that the mind performs on them, such as ‘ut, omnis, nullus’, and most crucially ‘est’ – the copula that relates simple terms to each other in a proposition at the second stage of logic.44 Aristotle characterises the second mental-linguistic action as composition/separation and affirmation/denial. Both these characterisations are taken up by seventeenth-century philosophers. Du Trieu defines a proposition as a judgement, ‘when something is affirmed or denied of something else’.45 Sanderson defines it compositionally.46 Hobbes goes so 39

40 42 43

44 45

46

Gassendi 1981, p. 80. See Osler (2002, p. 84) on Gassendi’s ‘empirical approach to the world’ in his logic. Arnauld and Nicole 1996, pp. 23; 26. 41 MS. Stowe 990, fo. 162r. See, for example, Burgersdijk 1668, pp. 18–20; Du Trieu 1826, pp. 6–20. Du Trieu 1826, p. 8 (De Termino Simplici et Complexo); p. 10 (De Termino Concreto et Abstracto); p. 12 (De Termino Connotativo et Absoluto); p. 16 (De Termino Univoca et Aequivoca). See also Burgersdijk 1668, p. 19; Locke 1975, pp. 420–75 (iii.iv–viii). Du Trieu 1826, pp. 6–7. See Nuchelmans 1998a, pp. 107–8. Du Trieu 1826, p. 2: ‘propositio . . . est alicuius de aliquo affirmativa negative oratio: ut, homo est animal ’. Sanderson 1985, p. 3.

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far as to call his work: Computatio sive logica.47 Gassendi and the Port-Royalists fuse the two accounts.48 In language, this is expressed by the copulative verb ‘is’ and makes propositions.49 The final mental action is an inference, whereby less known propositions are derived from better known ones, most perfectly conducted by the syllogism. Although the syllogism comes under attack from Bacon, Descartes and Locke, it remains remarkably robust as the accepted means of watertight reasoning, drawing the support, in their logics at least, of Gassendi, Hobbes and the Port-Royalists.50 Thomas Wilson’s Rule of Reason (1551) describes it as the ‘perfect argument’.51 Du Trieu actually calls his third tract De syllogismo.52 While the precise movements of these mental acrobatics are disputed, it is agreed that the linguistic procession maps a mental course. There is a compelling body of commentary that argues that in the course of the seventeenth century logic was transformed from a discursive and artificial discipline to one with an epistemological and natural focus, turning from language to psychology. This new logic has been called natural or facultative logic, or the logic of ideas. Based on the informal, native workings of the mind, it was designed both to emulate them and to train them towards truth and clarity.53 While logics had always been divided 47

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49 50

51

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For Hobbes reason is reckoning, the adding and subtracting of terms. He gives the example of seeing something far off, and thinking body, then observing the thing move and thinking animate, then hearing it speak and thinking rational. These single concepts ‘are composed into one name . . . man’ (Hobbes 1981, pp. 3–4). Gassendi 1981, p. 81; Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 23. The word ‘judgement’ was often used to name a much larger part of the logical enterprise as a result of the Ramist division of logic into two parts: invention and judgement. As Wilson (1553, fo. 2r) explains, inventio finds out the ‘matter’, whereas ‘framying of thinges aptly together, and knittyng woordes for the purpose accordyngly . . . in Latine is called Iudicium’. Aristotle 1938b, p. 121. Bacon (1996b, pp. 221–2) rejects it only for natural philosophy (Locke owned The Advancement of Learning (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 78)), Descartes (1985a, pp. 36–7) and Locke (1975, pp. 670–81 (iv.xvii.4–8)) for all reasoning. Running together formal and mental elements, he calls it ‘an absolute gatheryng, or resonyng, whereby the last sentence whiche we woulde prove, is confirmed by other propositions and sentences more universal, and better nowen then the thing whiche is proved’ (Wilson 1553, fo. 23r). He goes on to explain the three parts of a syllogism in temporal terms, calling them the ‘Antecedens, Consequens, Nova illationis’ (Du Trieu 1826, p. 120). Hobbes uses the same temporal language to describe scientific deduction (Hobbes 1981, p. 12). Early-modern discussions of inferential signs emerge out of antique (especially Epicurean) treatment of the subject, on which see Allen 2001; Jackson 1972, p. 115; Long and Sedley 1987, pp. 90–7; Markus 1996, p. 72. Ott (2004, pp. 7–33) argues that this is the tradition in which we should read Locke’s use of ‘signification’. Schuurman (2004) is the most recent work to make the case for a ‘new logic (of ideas)’, by contrast with ‘the old (Aristotelian)’ (p. 3). Schuurman identifies three elements that define the new logic: ideas, human faculties and method. For a longer engagement with his important book, see Dawson 2005b. Buickerood (1985) traces the rise of ‘facultative’ logic, fully realised in Locke’s Essay which compiled ‘a natural history of the understanding’ (p. 157) whose goal was ‘to formulate the

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according to the operations of the mind, these divisions had arguably played a purely superficial and structural role. For example, while Wallis divides his logic into the three ‘operations of the intellect’, these simply head a traditional division of the three parts of logic: ‘de vocibus’, ‘de propositione’ and ‘de argumentatione’. Wallis never ‘scrutinizes’ the operations themselves, as Locke is to do.54 This refigurative movement can be traced from Bacon’s Novum organum (1620) which, as its title suggests, is a replacement of Aristotelian logic,55 through Gassendi’s ars bene cogitandi and Descartes’ Regulae ad directionem Ingenii (written c. 1628) and his Discours de la me´thode pour bien conduire sa raison (1637), with the latter’s emphasis on clear and distinct ideas and on a natural, non-syllogistic method, to the offerings of Clauberg, Arnauld and Nicole, Spinoza, Malebranche and finally Locke,56 who inveighs against the suffocating artificiality of the syllogism and recommends instead ‘native rustick Reason’.57 Logic attains an increasingly holistic and normative agenda. Logicians expand their domain, now embracing the influence of passion and education on cognition. Logic becomes therapy for the mind, steering it away from error towards intellectual illumination. Gassendi says that logic should be an instrument to stop the mind from straying, ‘just as the carpenter provides himself with a ruler’.58 The Port-Royal Logique has the ambition of ‘educating our judgement and making it as precise as possible’.59 Spinoza and Locke are concerned with the ethics of the understanding, its ‘emendation’ and the correction of its ‘conduct’.60

54 55

56

57 58 60

principles of the habituated regulation of the mind in the apprehension of things, and the acquisition of knowledge and properly grounded opinion’ (p. 176). Cf. Land (1986, p. 7) on the shift from a formal to a psychological pursuit; Gaukroger (1989, p. 3) on the shift from a ‘discursive to a facultative conception of inference’; Michael (1997) on the move to epistemology. Nuchelmans (1998c, pp. 132–3) explains that formal logic was increasingly questioned in the seventeenth century. Passmore (1953) highlights Descartes’ opposition to formal logic. Thomas (1967, p. 534) describes formal logic from the mid-fifteenth century to the end of the seventeenth as ‘sterile’. See also Easton 1997, p. i; Schuurman 2000, pp. 62–3. Buickerood 1985, p. 160. Among the nineteen works Locke owned by Bacon, there are two editions of Novum organum (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 78). At the beginning of the Conduct of the Understanding (written 1697), Locke justifies his own revision of the logic whose ‘rules have served the learned world these two or three thousand years’, by appealing to ‘Verulam’s Authority’ who attacked and replaced it in his ‘Novum Organum concerning Logick’ (Locke 1993, p. 4). Schuurman (2000 and 2004) highlights Descartes as the radical innovator and Locke’s Essay as ‘the most outspoken specimen of the new logic’ (2004, p. 2). Michael (1997) stresses the primary importance of Gassendi, and then the Port-Royalists in effecting the revolution in logic. See Palmer (1997) on Descartes’ Regulae as an early-modern logic. Locke 1975, p. 679 (iv.xvii.6); cf., more generally, Locke 1975, pp. 668–88 (iv.xvii). Gassendi 1981, p. 80. 59 Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 5. See Spinoza 1985 (Tractatus de intellectus emendatione (1677)) and Locke 1993 (Of the Conduct of the Understanding) – a chapter intended for but never included in the Essay. Cf. De Dijn (1989) on

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Malebranche’s De la recherche de la ve´rite´ (1674–5) is a manual on error and how to avoid it.61 Indeed, Locke’s book on language, or rather on the impediment of language, aimed at banishing the cognitive faults induced by language, itself grows out, in part, of the increased attention being paid to the identification and purgation of error. In his Logica vetus et nova (1654), the scholastic-Cartesian occasionalist Johann Clauberg captures the new spirit. In Baconian fashion, he writes that ‘the origins and causes of the errors and imperfections of the human mind must be investigated’. Logic is the ‘medicine’ of the mind and will lead it away from such errors.62 However, it would be wrong to over-segregate the old from the new. While the concern was magnified in kind and scope, logicians had always been concerned with error, often devoting a fourth part of their books to a discussion of fallacious reasoning. Moreover, while the desire was doubtless reformulated, logics had always had ethical aspirations. For example, in his Aristotelian–Ramist Art of Logick, Thomas Spencer sees his art as ‘healing the wound we received in our reason by Adams fall’.63 While there was undoubtedly a revision of logic that kept time with the new way of ideas, commentators underplay both the importance of the mental component in traditional logic and the persistent inclusion of language in the new logic. While the Port-Royalists and Gassendi might advertise their contributions as arts of thinking, they still organise them broadly around terms, propositions and discourse, maintaining the old sense of an identity between language and thought. The revolution should not be overstated therefore. The ‘new’ logic did not deal ‘with ‘‘concepts’’ rather than terms’,64 but continued, perhaps with even greater

61

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63 64

Spinoza’s vision of logic as purifying the intellect and Passmore (1986) on Locke on the ‘ethics of belief ’. Schuurman (2000, pp. 75–7) sees Malebranche’s Recherche as an important contributor to the Cartesian logic of ideas in its focus on mental errors, and as an important influence on Locke, especially his Conduct, a manual for the ‘prevention and cure of errors that are relevant for Locke’s logic of ideas’ (p. 96). Cf. Schuurman 2004, pp. 44–50. Clauberg 1658, p. 1: ‘errorum & imperfectionum humanae mentis in rebus cognoscendis originem & causas investigandas esse’; p. 34. Locke had a copy of this in his library (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 109). On Clauberg’s reconciliation of scholasticism and Cartesianism see Bardout 2002. On Clauberg’s medicinal logic, see Hammacher 1981. Spencer 1970, sig. A3r. Easton 1997, p. i. While Descartes and Spinoza do vociferously banish language from reasoning, and are suspicious of its surreptitious and misleading interventions, as I shall show in chapter 6 (e.g. Descartes 1984a, p. 21, and Descartes 1985e, pp. 220–1; Spinoza 1994, p. 64), they do assume, in the context of their words, the continuity between language and thought which is so characteristic of the ‘old’ logic. While these texts are not squarely in the logical genre, the citations bear on the practice of thinking well.

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unreflectiveness than before, to elide the difference. It is this continuing amalgamation that will provoke Locke so urgently. I end this section by giving an impression of the fusion of language and thought that persists in seventeenth-century logic. In his translation of Peter Du Moulin’s The Elements of Logick (1624), Nathanael De-Lawne announces that the subject of the first book is ‘simple notions’. However, when he comes to define them he does so in linguistic terms, positing with breath-taking confidence a direct correlation between word-units and notion-units. ‘Simple Notions are such, as are expressed by one word onely; As horse, man, whiteness.’65 When he comes to define a proposition he moves seamlessly between the linguistic and the mental. ‘Enunciation is a speech, wherein something is affirmed or denied. Every enunciation consists of two words at the least, which the logicians call termes’.66 While Gassendi is generally careful to talk about ideas rather than terms in the first section of his Institutio logica, he returns to labyrinthine verbal analysis when he addresses propositions and syllogisms. ‘Every proposition is generally affirmative or negative, and affirmation and negation take place through the inclusion of the verb ‘‘is’’ or, with the addition of the negative particle, ‘‘is not’’.’ He then backtracks from his original silence on terms by telling us that ‘what precedes the verb is called the subject, being that which is made the foundation, like ‘Socrates’ and ‘Justice’ . . . and what follows the verb is called the attribute or predicate’.67 One unique, self-reflexive voice of concern about the confusion between language and thought which doubtless rings in Locke’s ears comes from the Port-Royalists.68 However, even they proceed from an initially self-consciously ideas-focused analysis to a linguistic one when they come to propositions and reasoning. They thereby threaten to erase their innovative caesura between mental and ideational discourse, publicising an ambition and a failure of ambition which were to inspire and provoke Locke respectively and in equal measure. language reflects the world All logicians agree that words refer to things in some, albeit highly interpretative, way. They also agree that there must be some mental component to linguistic reference. Moreover, despite the new philosophical inroads, 65 68

Du Moulin 1624, p. 2. 66 Du Moulin 1624, p. 106. 67 Gassendi 1981, p. 102. Arnauld and Nicole 1996, pp. 58–60. For a discussion of their critique see pp. 38–9 below.

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the Aristotelian classification of the world proves remarkably tenacious, continuing to capture the imaginations of logicians of all persuasions. While the balance between inquirer and object had always been disputed, logical language is commonly seen as comprehending the world as well as charting the sound operation of the mind. Ontological considerations appear in tandem with epistemological ones. When the Thomists say that logic deals with entia rationis, they mean things as conceived by the mind.69 Wallis declares that the objects of logic are ‘all things (either real or imagined)’ about which we can talk or reason.70 Sanderson describes logic as ‘an instrumental art, directing our mind in the understanding of all intelligible things’.71 Its end is the knowledge of ‘things (rerum)’.72 Burgersdijk, repeating Keckermann, casts logic as ‘directing the mind to the understanding of things’.73 While res and ‘things’ are ambiguous terms, tottering between the conceptual and the real, this ambiguity only follows from the supposed conformity of the two planes. Logicians certainly have the world in mind. Keckermann makes clear the real scope of logic. While it guides our mind, it does not do so ‘absolutely, but in relation to things’. Language is reflective ‘of things themselves in nature’.74 Language is supposed to deliver the nature of things, or rather, the nature of things as they are conceived, although few logicians advertise or dwell on the difference. The perceived correspondence between language and things is further brought out in the goal of truth, which runs centrally through the twists and turns of the logical tradition. It is the case that as the new philosophies of the seventeenth century dismantled the Aristotelian ontology that had informed logic, the discipline was still heavily Aristotelian and therefore shifted its focus from substance to form, from truth to thinking well.75 69 71

72 73

74

75

Nuchelmans 1998a, p. 106. 70 Wallis 1687, p. 1: ‘Resomnes; (sive Reales, sive Imaginariae)’. Sanderson 1985, p. 1: ‘ars instrumentalis, dirigens mentem nostram in cognitionem omnium intelligibilium’. Sanderson 1985, p. 1. Burgersdijk 1668, p. 1: ‘dirigens intellectum in cognitione rerum’. Cf. Keckermann 1600, sig. A1r: ‘Logica est ars dirigendi mentem in cognitione rerum’. Keckermann 1600, sigs. A1v-2r: ‘non absolute: sed in relatione ad res’; sig. A3v: ‘rerum ipsarum in natura’. See Feingold (1997, pp. 275–305) on the way in which logic had a purely ‘utilitarian’ role in the University of Oxford in the seventeenth century, and Schuurman (2000, pp. 52–3) on how logic came to be regarded less as the path to truth and more as a propadeutic for thinking well. For alternative viewpoints see: Easton (1997, p. ii) on the lack of ‘clear boundary lines separating logic from epistemology or metaphysics in the early modern period’; Rossi (1968, p. 8) on a move, through Ramism, from logic as the art of discussion to logic as the instrument for natural research. On the earlier commitment to truth see, for example, Howell, W. (1961, p. 3) on ‘Renaissance logic’ as concerned primarily ‘to achieve a valid verbalization of reality’, and Ashworth (1974, p. 27) on post-medieval logic as more ‘philosophical’ than ‘formal’.

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However, many of those logics that did absorb the new philosophy remained committed to the goal of truth, albeit in a different guise. More generally, textbooks continued to peddle truth as their aim. The logical emphasis on veracity had also been challenged by humanists, who attended not so much to truth, as to probability, rhetoric and topical reasoning, and preferred the title ‘dialectic’. Wilson, for example, defines ‘logique’ as ‘an arte to reason probably, on both partes’. He analyses non-demonstrative arguments, including ‘enthymema’, ‘induction’, ‘example’ and ‘sorites’. However, humanists did not jettison the goal of truth.76 The very same Wilson also declares that logic ‘settes foorth the trueth’.77 Bacon provides another example of how humanists continue to pursue truth, albeit refracted through a new lens. He extracts induction from the lesser forms of argument, redefines it and puts it on a veridical pedestal in the field of natural philosophy.78 Moreover, scholastic logicians had always discussed dialectical or probable knowledge.79 By the seventeenth century, the two traditions were fused in the mainstream logics. Burgersdijk regards ‘logic’ and ‘dialectic’ as interchangeable and covers ‘imperfect’ forms of argument, in addition to the syllogism.80 While Gassendi and Port-Royal include an analysis of probable reasoning, they also remain devoted to the search for truth. The Port-Royalists explain that logic enables one to ‘discern’ ‘the true and the false’.81 Gassendi says that logic ought to make thought ‘free from error’, and thereby ‘attain the mark at which it aims, that is, truth itself’.82 At the beginning of De interpretatione Aristotle had explained how words bridge on to the world by means of the mind: Words spoken are symbols or signs of affections or impressions of the soul; written words are the signs of words spoken. As writing, so also is speech not the same for 76

77 78

79

80

81

Wilson 1553, fos. 1v; 31r–34v. See Jardine (1988, p. 197) on the humanist introduction of ‘ad hoc and occasional arguments’ to the Organon. Wilson 1553, fos. 1v; 2v. He writes about ‘the induction which the logicians speak of’, and condemns it as ‘utterly vicious and incompetent’, on the grounds that ‘to conclude upon an enumerations of particulars without instance contradictory is no conclusion, but a conjecture’ (Bacon 1996b, p. 221). The final sections of logics usually dealt with topics or ‘the seat[s] of an argument’ (Sanderson 1985, p. 183), which are often divided into three (demonstrative, dialectical and sophistic) from which three types of argument and knowledge (certain, probable and sophistical) are drawn respectively. E.g. Du Trieu (1826, p. 157) discusses ‘demonstrative’ and ‘dialectical’, ‘litigious’ arguments; cf. Burgersdijk 1668, pp. 34–40; Gassendi 1981, pp. 144–55. These sections also often include or precede a discussion of method, the influential offspring of humanist, especially Ramist, reform. Even Descartes, who shuns formal logic, retains the notion of method, and writes his own Discours de la me´thode. Sanderson, Gassendi and the Port-Royalists all include a section on method. Burgersdijk 1634, pp. 2–3; Burgersdijk (1668, p. 33) enumerates inductio, enthymema, exemplum, syllogismus hypotheticus, syllogismus disjuctivus, dilemma and sorites. Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 5. 82 Gassendi 1981, p. 80.

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all races of men. But the mental affections themselves, of which these words are primarily signs, are the same for the whole of mankind, as are also the objects of which those affections are representations or likenesses, images, copies.83

This gobbet is the foundation of early-modern philosophy of language, containing three claims that become, in the main, axiomatic. First, Aristotle lays down the rarely contested law that words are conventional. Second, he declares that while words, because they are purely conventional, differ between people, the concepts (like the things) they signify are the same for all men. We will hear these two claims being repeated, if sometimes tested, throughout this book. Now I look at the third maxim that Aristotle dictates: words signify concepts which, in turn, signify and resemble objects.84 While his followers debate heatedly about the matter, they agree that concepts are integral to the signification of things. Moreover, they tend to present these concepts not as obstacles, but as straightforward ways of knowing those things. Ockham asserts that words are imposed on both things and concepts: ‘words are applied to the very same things which are signified by mental concepts’.85 John of St. Thomas asks ‘whether vocal expressions primarily signify concepts or things?’ His answer begins with a statement on which he believes there to be general agreement: ‘we suppose as granted by all that vocal expressions signify formal concepts as much as objective ones, since this is clearly established by the philosopher’. He argues that because words signify both things and concepts ‘by the same imposition’, they signify them ‘by one single signification’.86 The Coimbra commentary provides an extensive gloss on De interpretatione I. It lays out three positions. The first, ‘Scotist’, position holds that ‘words are substituted for concepts . . . but they do not signify them’; when words are used, it is ‘things’ which are ‘revealed’. The second, ‘Boethian’, position maintains that ‘only concepts are signified by words’. The third and favoured position steers a middle course – ‘words signify both concepts and things themselves’.87 However, the discussion is not yet closed. The next question 83

84 85

86 87

Aristotle 1938b, p. 115. Demonet (1992, p. 88) describes these lines of Aristotle as ‘le cate´chisme de la the´orie du langage a` la Renaissance’. Modrak (2001) argues for the modernity and defensibility of Aristotle’s theory of meaning. Panaccio 1999a, p. 398. Ockham 1990, p. 48: ‘voces imponuntur ad significandum illa eadem, quae per conceptus mentis significatur’. John of St. Thomas 1985, pp. 344; 345. Collegium Conimbricense 1610, p. 305: ‘voces substitui quidem pro conceptibus intellectus, sed eos non significare . . . quia vocibus utimur, ut ostendamus rem, quam mente apprehendimus’; p. 306: ‘vocibus solos conceptus significari’; ‘voces tum conceptus, tum res ipsas significare’.

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is whether words immediately signify concepts or things. Like John of St. Thomas, the commentary decides that both concepts and things are signified immediately. Burgersdijk argues that words signify concepts primarily and things secondarily.88 After much convolution in his disputations on Aristotle’s Organon, the Jesuit Martin Smiglecius, recommended to students by both Holdsworth and Locke, asserts the opposite.89 Hobbes responds to this debate by declaring that they are all talking rubbish. Words can only ever signify concepts: Since, as has been defined, names ordered in speech are signs of conceptions, it is obvious that they are not signs of things themselves; for in what sense can the sound of this spoken word ‘‘stone’’ be understood to be a sign of a stone, other than that whoever might have heard this vocal sound will gather that the speaker has thought of a stone? Therefore the dispute over whether names signify matter, form, or a composite of them and other disputes of this kind are characteristic of erring metaphysicians who do not understand the words about which they are arguing.90

Hobbes is truistically reminding his readers that a speaker can only express the contents of his mind, and he cannot have stones in there.91 He is also probably making a polemical point against Aristotle, who had postulated that when a man thinks of a stone, while ‘the stone does not exist in the soul’, the ‘form of the stone’ does, thereby almost identifying concept and thing.92 As if responding to Hobbes’ rude ejection of stones from speech, John Sergeant, critic of Locke – the next staunch defender of purely ideational signification – declares that when we judge that ‘a stone is hard, we do not intend to affirm that the likeness or idea of a stone is hard, but the very stone itself’. His logic, The Method to Science (1696), attests to the continuing belief that, by means of ‘notions’ or ‘meanings’, we ‘discourse of the very thing it self, and of its very nature’.93 88 89

90

91

92 93

Burgersdijk 1634, p. 141. Holdsworth 1961, p. 635; Ashworth 1981, p. 304; Smiglecius 1618, p. 5. On this debate see Ashworth 1981; 1984, pp. 62–4, and 1987. Pinborg (1984b) explains how this debate intersects with the nominalist/realist debate. Hobbes 1981, p. 15. Martinich’s translation of ‘quo sensu enim intelligi potest sonum hujus vocis lapis esse signum lapidis’ reads ‘for in what sense can the sound of the vocal sound ‘‘stone’’ be understood to be a sign of a stone’. Sorell (1999) argues that Hobbes moved from being antiAristotelian to ‘simply unAristotelian’ (p. 364); cf. Leijenhorst (2002a) on the Aristotelian framework of Hobbes’ mechanical philosophy. However, even Hobbes includes things (loosely) in language to the extent that they cause ideas (e.g. Hobbes 1996, p. 13). Aristotle 1935, p. 181. Sergeant 1696, pp. 2; 3; 2. Locke’s copy of this edition was given to him by the author (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 230). Phemister (1993) asserts a continuity between Locke and Sergeant over experience and demonstration which is severed by Locke’s refusal ‘to countenance demonstration in natural science’ (p. 249).

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Notwithstanding their general commitment to mentalism, there are three ways in which logicians contemplate an unmediated relationship between words and things. First, they refer back to a remark Aristotle had made in his Sophistici Elenchis that contradicted his more vociferous commitment to mentalism. ‘For’, he writes, ‘not being able to point to the things themselves that we reason about, we use names instead of the realities as their symbols.’94 The second intimation of a direct link between language and the world appears in the theory of supposition. Late-medieval Terminists were concerned with what we might now call the reference of a term, and how it might be ‘restricted’ or ‘ampliated’.95 ‘Appellation’ is the most restricted form of reference. Peter of Spain defines it as ‘the acceptance of a term for an existent thing’. Therefore ‘chimera’ has no appellation.96 ‘Supposition’ is the more general word used for thinking about a term’s reference, and is determined by its sentential context. Peter defines supposition as ‘the acceptance of a substantial term for something’.97 Ockham explains that ‘ ‘‘supposition’’ means taking the position, as it were, of something else’.98 Du Trieu’s inclusion of a treatment of supposition in his logic adumbrates the perseverance of the theory in the seventeenth century.99 ‘Supposition’ is a technical term whose sense we have lost, but an awareness of its provenance will illuminate Locke’s critique of language. The theory of supposition indicates that the possibility of reference to things outside the mind is built firmly into early-modern philosophy of language. When a word is ‘supposed’ to be a thing, it literally stands in its place.100 The third incursion into the mentalism that characteristically underscores linguistic theory is more subtle. While it is agreed that words signify concepts as well as things, this dual signification is often hidden, the relation between the two elements unflagged and unexplored, one subsumed by the other, reducing language to a bipartite association between words and ‘things’. While these ‘things’ sporadically appear under the heading of conceptions, they soon loose their mental identity, as men and dogs appear laughing and barking on the pages. It is the nature of these (concept-)things to which I now turn. 94 95 96

97 100

Aristotle 1987, p. 3. See Sedley 1996. For helpful summaries see Marenbon 1991, pp. 43–7, and Ashworth 1974, pp. 77–92. Peter of Spain 1990, p. 175. See Ashworth (1974, p. 92) on appellation as the denotation of some existent object. Peter of Spain 1990, p. 69. 98 Ockham 1990, p. 64. 99 Du Trieu 1826, p. 107. On signification, supposition, sense and reference see De Rijk 1989a; De Rijk 1989b; Henry 1981; Pinborg 1984a; Spade 1998, pp. 412–15.

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What is this world that is grasped by language in logic? We might expect the ontologies embedded in seventeenth-century logic to reflect the contested natural philosophy of the period. Given that some logicians are also principal players in the new philosophy, we might imagine any uniform characterisation of ‘the world according to logical language’ to be entirely redundant. But in fact, with the exceptions of Descartes and Bacon, even the ‘newest’ of logicians subscribe, superficially at least and with perplexing consistency, to a well-worn Aristotelian map of the world. We ought to remember this when we come to the denunciation by Locke and others of the way that people take words for things and, more particularly, logical classifications for reality. Their ferocity seems less strange in the face of an apparently strong, inflexible and unproblematised verbal–real caricature which was imprinted in young minds.101 The map of the world usually consists of natural ‘substances’, such as ‘horse, man, tree’, although some logicians include non-natural entities, or ‘accidents’ as they are sometimes called, such as ‘justice, beauty’.102 As I have already indicated, despite the more complicated accounts given by the philosophers to whom logicians are indebted (or whom they are) about the construction of universals, these concepts–things seem in (and out of) the logics to be almost passively and simply conceived, and therefore common to all people. Aristotle had used ‘man’ as an example of just such a concept that is neither combined nor disjoined and therefore incapable of truth or falsity.103 ‘Man’ appears ubiquitously in logics, as the paradigm ‘simple’.104 Cartesians recast simple concepts in accordance with their epistemology. The Port-Royalists’ are ‘thinking . . . judging, reasoning . . . being, existence, duration, order, and number’. They declare that we have ‘very clear ideas’ of thinking and extended substance.105 While Aristotle, and then Aquinas, explains how we actively abstract from particulars before we cognise the universal, and while Descartes describes how we perceive clear and distinct ideas by scraping away sensible ones, these processes, particularly the Thomist–Aristotelian one, at least as they appear in the logics, seem to be effortless. Or rather, the effort is rarely promulgated, the simple conceptions of essentially simple things 101

102

103 105

Lear (1988, p. 229) explains how Aristotle laid bare the ‘broad structure of reality’: ‘at the apex were essences and the predications which expressed them’. Du Moulin 1624, pp. 3; 4. I include Du Moulin’s examples of moral simplicity because Locke will inveigh against the non-judgemental simplicity of ideas of mixed modes as well as substances (his development of the accident/substance distinction). Aristotle 1938b, p. 117. 104 E.g. Du Trieu 1826, p. 9. Cf. Peter of Spain 1990, p. 69. Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 49. See Clarke (1981, pp. 27–8) on Descartes’ substitution of intuitius for the ignorance of the dialectians.

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confidently paraded, and a tight link between concept and thing maintained. The important thing to note, that will leave Locke open-mouthed, is the advertised simplicity of big concepts–things, especially substances like ‘horse’, that, having nothing affirmed or denied of them, are therefore relatively untouched by human intervention and shared by all. In this initial conception there is no combination or judgement, only a direct and (relatively) inactive reception of things. Burgersdijk explains that a ‘simple theme’ is one that is ‘apprehended without complex thought, without affirmation or negation; such as Socrates, disputat, respublica’.106 The possibility of truth and falsity only enters at the second, propositional stage of thinking, when simple things are affirmed or denied of each other. The Coimbra commentary defines a proposition as ‘a speech which signifies truth or falsity’.107 Whatever the more philosophical logicians scruple to tell us about the activity of abstraction which delivers universal concepts, it is only when we do things with these concepts that the mind is presented as taking full control – before this, the objects of thought are given more than made. Logicians therefore make ambitious claims for the scope of their substantial terms whose meanings are simple and indisputable, having been acted upon barely visibily by the mind. Moreover, logicians give the impression that verbal simplicity and universality corresponds with conceptual–ontological simplicity and universality. Single words seem to stand for single concepts–things. Keckermann declares that ‘a simple thing is that which is expressed with one word, like man’.108 For Sanderson, a ‘simple conception’ finds expression in ‘simple terms’.109 Wallis announces that ‘simple terms’ signify ‘simple apprehensions’.110 Logicians are aware that there is not necessarily a numerical correspondence between word and meaning. Hobbes explains ‘that a name is not to be taken in philosophy as it is in grammar’; ‘ ‘‘sentient animate body’’ is one name for philosophers because [it applies] to one thing, to each and every animal, while for grammarians it is three names’.111 But the Hobbesian warning is not much broadcast. Verbal units give the lie to equally unitary meanings. It is the presumption of passively received, simple and universal (concepts of ) substances, particularly as trumpeted by Aristotelians and Cartesians, and fostered by simple words, that Locke will deconstruct. 106

Burgersdijk 1668, p. 1. Cf. Gassendi 1981, p. 80. Collegium Conimbricense 1610, p. 329: ‘enuntiatio est oratio significans verum, vel falsum’. 108 Keckermann 1600, sig. A4r: ‘res simplex est, quae unica voce exprimitur, ut homo’. 109 Sanderson 1985, pp. 2–3. 110 Wallis 1687, p. 22. 111 Hobbes 1981, p. 21. Cf. Burgersdijk 1668, p. 1. See Tachau (1987) on complexe significabile. 107

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These simple elements slot neatly into the grand and comprehensive taxonomy of the world that logicians confidently proffer. They take Aristotle’s ten categories or predicaments (substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, action, passion, posture, state), and the five universals or predicables (genus, species, difference, property, accident) that Porphyry had systematised in his Isagoge (an introduction to Aristotle’s Categories), as crucial for ‘true’ and ‘proper’ reasoning. Wilson writes that ‘a predicament is . . . a rehearsyng what wordes maie be truly ioined together, or els a settyng foorth of the nature of every thing and also shewyng what maie be truly spoken, and what no’.112 The realist (in both senses) appearance of the linguistic taxonomy is unmistakable. Res and verba are enveloped by the title ‘predicable’. According to Burgersdijk, predicables ‘are truly, properly, naturally, and immediately affirmed of many’.113 However, this referential ambition might implode under a critical gaze, as it seems that predicables are constituted intertextually, in reference to each other. The ‘genus’ is ‘that which is predicated of many different species’, and ‘species’ ‘that which is gathered under the genus’.114 Terms like ‘man’ or ‘animal’ do not have fixed places in the anatomy; their status is determined by context. For example, ‘animal’ would be the genus with respect to ‘man’, but the ‘species’ with respect to ‘animate’. The Port-Royal Logique is explicit about this: ‘the same idea can be a genus with respect to the ideas to which it extends, and a species when compared to another, more general idea’.115 Du Trieu inadvertently reveals the pre-determined circularity of the deductive process in two disparate examples of supposedly demonstrative inferences: ‘man is an animal, man is sensitive’ and ‘every man is sensitive, therefore every man is an animal ’.116 Textbook accounts of universals invoke a hermetically sealed map, whose marks only signify differentially, not transcendentally. 112

113

114

115 116

Wilson 1553, fo. 7v (my emphasis). Cf. Nuchelmans (1998a, pp. 111–12) on how it was thought that the categories ought to be an ‘inventory of things in the world’. Jardine (1974, p. 19) argues that sixteenth-century dialectical handbooks saw linguistic structures as mapping ontological ones. See Ong (1958, p. 70) on the impression, inherent in the long-standing logical framework, that words stand for things. Burgersdijk 1668, p. 7: ‘quae de pluribus vere, proprie, naturaliter, atque immediate affimantur’. Cf. Du Trieu 1826, p. 30; Sanderson 1985, p. 4. Burgersdijk 1668, p. 8: ‘genus est, quod de pluribus specie differentibus praedicatur . . . species est, que collocatur sub genere’. Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 41. Du Trieu 1826, p. 121: ‘Bona est, cuius consequens legitime infertur ex ante cedente: ut, Homo est animal, homo est sensitivus’; p. 120: ‘argumentatio est oratio, in qua unum ex alio colligitur; ut, Omnis homo est sensitivus, ergo omnis homo est animal ’.

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Even so, embedded in the watertight classificatory map are pretensions to an essentialist ontology which is exacting, real and intelligible.117 Wallis tells us that the first three predicables (genus, species, difference) are ‘essential’ to the subject, whereas the last two (property and accident) are merely ‘accidental’ to it.118 The rigid strength of essentialism reveals itself in elaborations of difference – the quality which essentially distinguishes between things. There are three acceptations of the word ‘difference’, says Sanderson. The first and vulgar one differentiates something from another on the basis of ‘accidental’ and ‘separable’ difference, such as ‘Socrates standing’ from ‘Plato sitting’. The second and more proper means of differentiating things is by some ‘inseparable accident’, such as distinguishing Plato from Socrates on the basis of their different noses. The third and most proper means of differentiation is on the grounds of an ‘essential’ difference, the like of which divides rational Socrates from irrational Bucephalus.119 Arnauld and Nicole write that ‘real definitions’ identify ‘the nature of a thing by its essential attributes, of which the common one is called the genus, and the proper one the difference. Thus a human being is defined as a rational animal, the mind as a substance that thinks, the body as an extended substance.’120 Cartesianism is thus woven into the traditional logical fabric, simultaneously subverting and revitalising the genre. In contrast to essential differences, properties and accidents are inessential. Properties, such as ‘being capable of laughter’ or ‘two-footed’, are ‘necessary’ with respect to ‘man’ but not ‘essential’. Accidents are even further from the heart of substances. Du Trieu defines an accident as ‘that which is present or absent without the corruption of the subject . . . such as white, with respect to a wall’. He goes on to explain that accidents are either ‘separable’, such as ‘sleep, with respect to men’, or ‘inseparable’, such as ‘white’, with respect to swans, thereby depicting sensible qualities as discrete entities in a way that will upset the new philosophers.121 Wallis says that while a property of something is not ‘essential’ to it, it is ‘necessarily conjoined’ to it, as ‘capable of laughter’ is in the case of ‘man’. Some accidents, none of which are ‘necessary’ to the subject, are ‘separable’ from the subject, such as ‘white’ in the case

117 118 121

See Dean 1998 on essentialism and method. Cf. Friedman 1999. Wallis 1687, p. 16. 119 Sanderson 1985, p. 12. 120 Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 126. Du Trieu 1826, p. 48: ‘quod adest atque abest sine subjecti corruptione . . . ut, album, respectu parietis’; p. 49.

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of ‘wool’ and ‘paper’, while some are ‘inseparable’, such as ‘heat’ in the case of ‘fire’ and ‘blackness’ in the case of ‘raven’.122 Real truth and falsity are determined by predicables and categories with stipulative assurance. For example, Burgersdijk explains an essentially true proposition as one in which ‘either the genus is predicated of the species; as, Man is an animal, or the difference is predicated of the species; as, Man is rational.’ A merely necessarily true proposition is formed when ‘the property is predicated of its subject’, as in ‘man is capable of laughter’.123 This reified and precise linguistic web is said to copy the world. There had always been a debate, which intensifies again in the seventeenth century, over whether and to what extent the linguistic taxonomy truly maps the divisions of nature. The old guard had never been oblivious to the interpretative interface between words–concepts and the world, as in the old nominalist/realist controversy. Sophisticated scholastic logicians had always busied themselves with disputations about the nature of their entia rationis, and how they grasped the world. Smiglecius asks whether ‘an entity of reason consists in the impossible conjunction of several things’, ‘whether an entity of reason is a concept or exists outside the mind’, ‘or and in what way an entity of reason is made by the intellect’.124 With the pressure of the scientific revolution and the recrudescence of scepticism there is a general rejection of the intelligible forms and sensible species of Aristotle’s world, and increasing doubt about the mind’s capacity to penetrate the heart of matter. Notwithstanding certain critical discriminations about the real/rational divide and the growing sense that words are out of step with the world, the logic textbooks – a fundamental repository of linguistic–ontological wisdom – move seamlessly between a linguistic and an ontological account. Students would be forgiven for thinking that they were reading a straightforward definition of the world. For example, Du Trieu defines the categories as ‘a series or order of terms’, and then goes on to talk 122

123

124

Wallis 1687, pp. 17; 20. Cf. Ong (1958) on the increasing reification, simplification and dichotomisation of logical classifications as a result of Ramist reform. Burgerskijk 1668, p. 22: ‘In quibus vel genus praedicatur de specie; ut, Homo est animal vel differentia; ut, Homo est rationalis’; ‘In quibus proprietas praedicantur de subjecto suo . . . ut, Homo est risibilis’. Smiglecius 1618: ‘an ens rationis consistat in conjunctione impossibili plurium rerum’ (p. 9); ‘utrum ens rationis sit conceptus aut denominatio extrinseca’ (p. 17); ‘an quomodo ens rationis fiat ab intellectu’ (p. 25). See Marenbon (2000a) on the debates over the linguistic/intellectual/real content of the categories; Marenbon (2000b) on Abelard’s conception of the categories not as a reflection of the ‘order of things, but merely a feature of how language signifies them’ (p. 57); De Rijk (1989c) on Ockham’s emphasis on the manufactured nature of logical conceptual apparatus.

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about their reality.125 Zachary Coke’s Art of Logick (1654) says unambiguously that ‘things themselves are placed in the predicaments . . . conceits and names of things but secondarily, and so far forth as they represent things’.126 The Port-Royalists reject Aristotle’s categories because they ‘are viewed as based on reason and truth, when in fact they are completely arbitrary, having no foundation but the imagination of one man who had no authority to prescribe laws to others’. But their proposed replacement categories (mind, body, measure, position, shape, motion and rest) only prove the point that logical distinctions are considered to map the world. They condemn Aristotle’s categories because they ‘accustom people to be satisfied with words’.127 One might counter that they just substitute one empty linguistic structure for another. cracks in the mirror The new philosophical inroads into scholastic epistemology and ontology that I shall explore in chapter 4 threaten to shatter the logicians’ linguistic mirror of things. Beyond these external assaults there are internal weaknesses that, to a sensitive student of logic, might also pulverise the glass. I identify three possible sites of discontent. The first concerns the practice of logic. In tandem with textbooks, students learnt the art of logic by means of, and with the ultimate aim of, disputation, an activity that, it was complained, elevated victory above truth, thereby robbing speech of veracity. Disputation played a vital part in a student’s education, as Holdsworth makes clear in his detailed advice on the matter. What counts is having readily to hand the most popular lines.128 In his textbook, Sanderson includes an appendix on ‘disputation’, where he explains how the disputant might conquer his opponent.129 The practice is quintessentially adversarial. The title of the discipline indicates this, as Peter of Spain explains, ‘this art is called ‘dialectic’ from ‘dia’, which means ‘two’ and ‘logos’, which means ‘discourse’ . . . suggesting the discoursing . . . of a pair, an opponent and a respondent in disputing’.130 Although it is vociferously maintained that it will thrash out the truth, many philosophers are concerned that victory has more to do with a sharp tongue, and that therefore students are encouraged vainly to cultivate their verbal weapons at the expense of truth, with the effect that its very 125 127 128

Du Trieu 1826, pp. 51–2. 126 Coke 1969, p. 19. Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 34. Holdsworth 1961, p. 636. 129 Sanderson 1985, pp. 40–66.

130

Peter of Spain 1990, p. 1.

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existence comes to be doubted.131 Bacon describes the ‘point’ of syllogistic logic as ‘to master an adversary in argument’. He characterises it as a purely ‘verbal’ exercise, sealed off from nature.132 His assertion is commonplace. In his Academiarum examen (1654) John Webster says that at university he learnt nothing except ‘artificially how to chide’.133 John Ley recounts, in his Discourse of Disputations (1658), how the unsuspecting are ‘easily intangled’ in the ‘deceit’ and ‘subtilty’ of skilled disputants.134 Thomas White accuses religious disputations, in his Controversy-Logicke (1659), of being not only ‘needeless, useless’, but also ‘dangerous’ because ‘tongue, and chance, do for the most part beare a great sway, and have a maine stroake, and oftentimes, to breake and disorder the better cause’.135 In his Logica, sive Ars ratiocinandi (1692) (massively indebted to Locke’s Essay), Jean Le Clerc explains that logic originated in the mouths of loquacious ancient fighters, and as a result deals with words, not cogitations, teaching one to dispute on any subject rather than investigate truth.136 Doctors of logic are themselves self-conscious about the tension between truth and victory occasioned by the controversial setting to which the subject is inextricably joined. De Lawne protests too much against the accusation that logic teaches its students ‘to turne white into black, and black into white, to serve their owne purposes, and to make people beleeve what they list’.137 Du Moulin himself admits that in ‘bad hands’ the art is transformed ‘into a faggot of dry thornes, which pricketh on every side’.138 Wilson offers tactical tips for the battle, where the prize is won by striking one’s opponent dumb by blinding them with ‘mocke matier’. The logical treatment of sophistry is supposed to enable upstanding students to evade sophists. However, it also darkly teaches, or at least attests to the existence of, cynical fighters. Wilson draws a colourful portrait of these swashbucklers: It is a wonde to see the subtle brain, of many braggyng bodies with bold countenaunce, beare an outward shadowe of wisdome havyng onely the maskyng 131

132 135 136

137

E.g. Wilson 1553, fo. 60v. See Ong (1971, p. 65) on the ‘omnipresence of the oratorical frame of mind’, which led the learned to take ‘any side, perhaps, but some side certainly’. See also Walmsley 1993. Bacon 1857, iv, p. 411. 133 John Webster 1970, p. 92. 134 Ley 1658, p. 4. White 1659, sig. A5v-A6r. Le Clerc 1692, p. 2. Locke was given this edition by the author (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 111). He notes that he received it in April 1692 (MS. Locke f. 10, p. 133). In a letter to Locke, Molyneux criticises Le Clerc’s Logica, ‘in all which he has little extraordinary but what he borrows from you; and in the alteration he gives them he robbs them of their native beautys’ (Locke 1976–1989, iv, p. 601). Savonius (2002) explains Locke’s and Le Clerc’s closely related logical projects in terms of cultural and political reform. Du Moulin, sig. )( 3. 138 Du Moulin 1624, recto side of the leaf immediately preceding sig. A1.

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visage, and lackyng the naturall face. Thei will stande stoutely in maintenaunce of an untruthe, and with countenauce seme to share it: yea, and by their bolde bearying it out, almost perswade the hearers, that they onely have the true part, and the other are altogether deceived.139

In men battling to win the argument, language might well outwit the truth. The second way logic threatens to detach verba from res is in its applause for authority. Words accrue credibility by the external virtue of their speaker rather than their internal sense. Most notoriously, scholastic logicians defer consistently to Aristotle.140 In addition to submitting to the words of particular authorities, students are advised on the high status of authoritative statements more generally. These are drawn from topics or loci and are to be used as proofs for demonstrative as well as probable arguments.141 Logical ‘maxims’ are self-evident propositions which may be used as certain premises. Peter of Spain educes from the topic of ‘definition’ the maxim that ‘anything predicated of a definition is predicated of the thing defined’. This yields the certain argument that ‘a rational, mortal, animal runs, so man runs’.142 As Gassendi says of maxims, ‘it is sufficient only to grasp their meaning in order to give assent to them’. Gassendi’s examples are of both a practical and a speculative nature: ‘the whole is greater than any of its parts’; ‘God and Nature do nothing in vain’; ‘no-one is able to hate the good as good, nor love evil as evil’.143 In a way that would annoy Locke, these linguistic assertions are presented as irresistible, perspicuous and often innate. They and the universals that are their constituent parts are characteristically abstract and general, and are often described as ‘better known’ (notiora) – which sounds counterintuitive to empiricists for whom particulars are better known.144 The final crack in the mirror of language is explicitly promulgated by logicians. Their accounts of sophistry, with which they routinely conclude their books, reveal how univocity – the mainstay of both communication and ratiocination – might shatter. Gassendi explains that fallacious reasoning occurs when ‘there is present some ambiguity of word or expression, and the sense of the word or expression is different in the proposition from what it is in the assumption, so that it is not surprising 139 140

141

142

Wilson 1553, fo. 63r. See, e.g., Descartes (1985c, p. 147) on scholastics being like ivy on Aristotle, the tree. Cf. Marenbon 1991, p. 9. See, e.g., Gassendi 1981, pp. 113–9; Sanderson 1985, pp. 183–211. As a result of the humanist reform which bring rhetoric and logic closer together, ‘human authority’ or ‘testimony’ becomes a locus in logic from where so-called ‘inartificial proofs’, or probable arguments, are drawn (e.g. in Gassendi 1981, p. 119, and Sanderson 1985, p. 208). See Serjeantson 1999. Peter of Spain 1990, p. 52. 143 Gassendi 1981, pp. 113–14. 144 E.g. Peter of Spain 1990, p. 51.

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that when both have been admitted as true an absurd conclusion follows’. Sophists mine the multivocity of words, inducing absurd, but formally sound conclusions. Gassendi takes the classic example of an ambiguous word that can be used as the middle term to reason falsely. ‘A certain star is Sirius; a dog is a barking animal . . . therefore, a certain star is a barking animal.’145 In his Sophistici Elenchi, Aristotle refers to the success of sophistic speech: In reasoning, those who are unacquainted with the power of names are deceived by paralogisms both when they are parties to the controversy and when they form the audience. From this cause . . . there exist proofs and confutations that are apparent but unreal.146

Aristotle’s audience, his critics as well as his supporters, all agree that names have a ‘power’ that outstrips both truth and univocity. As a rule, the logical treatment of ambiguity is firmly contained. It is an avoidable and identifiable misuse of language. Semantic instability does not escape from its demarcated area into language as a whole. Following Aristotle’s piece of common sense, it is taken for granted that men share a universal mental discourse, emanating as it does from one world.147 There are a few exceptions to this rule. At the thoughtful heart of scholastic logic, writers wonder about the implications of the assumption that words signify the speaker’s thoughts.148 Smiglecius asks whether ‘the signification of a word ought to be taken from the concept of the impositor, or from the concept of the hearer’. He concludes that the signification of an utterance must come from impositors alone, however imperfectly they understand the thing. His reason is that ‘words are signs of concepts, and we express by our words, that which we conceive in the mind’.149 It is not, then, at the margins, but at the centre of the scholastic fortress, that it is mooted that the meanings of the same words might be different in different people’s mouths. But these are murmurs drowned out in the noisy, mainstream confidence in semantic uniformity. There is one other lone, but powerful, voice that probes the fact of semantic individualism, with extraordinarily sceptical results. Into the 145 146 147

148 149

Gassendi 1981, pp. 152; 153. Sanderson (1985, p. 215) gives the same example. Aristotle 1987, p. 5. Pinborg 1984a, p. 254: ‘the fundamental dictum of medieval semantics that language (as expression) imitates the conceptual contents which are common to all men’. Ashworth 1974, p. 44. Cf. Ashworth 1981, pp. 317–18. Smiglecius 1618, p. 12: ‘An vocis significatio sumi debeat ex conceptu imponentis, vel ex conceptu audientis’; p. 14: ‘verba sunt signa conceptuum, & id verbis exprimimus, quod in mente concepimus’.

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very first section of their Logique, the one that deals with ideas, the PortRoyalists insert a warning about words. They declare that although we ought to reason solely with the significations of words, habit and necessity force us to ‘pay more attention to the words than to the things’. The problem is, they tell us, that words do not necessarily stand for the same ideas for different people: We should note that while people often have different ideas about the same things, still they use the same words to express them. For example, a pagan philosopher’s idea of virtue differs from a theologian’s idea, and yet each expresses his idea by the same word, ‘virtue’. Moreover, people in different ages have viewed the same things quite differently, and yet they have always collected all these ideas under the same name. This causes us to become easily confused when uttering a word or hearing it uttered, since we take it sometimes for one idea, sometimes for another.

They go on to give the examples of ‘soul’ and ‘life’, crucial words that are multiply (mis)understood.150 Their point is that cultural and temporal relativism mean that different people understand different things by the same word. Words have a history; they amass a cluster of diverse and possibly contradictory meanings under the same nominal umbrella. The Port-Royalists conclude that ‘every language is full of countless similar words that share only the same sound, but are nevertheless signs of completely different ideas’.151 This is the most radical and devastating rejection of the twin traditional beliefs in univocal languages and an eternal community of meaning. This critique is less a central tenet of the Logique than a note of caution that has in its sights scholastic philosophy rather than speakers in general. It does not deter the Port-Royalists from keeping their assertive linguistic-ideational course. However, to pricked ears it is a provocative deconstruction of the cavalier conjunction of res and verba, an indication that language might not be a transparent window on to meaning. While there are chinks in the logicians’ armour, however, the view of language that they defend is robust. While words signify concepts, these concepts are generally seen not to veil the world but to reveal it. So limpid is the vision that concepts afford of things, that they seem to melt into each other, and verba to map res in a perfect symmetry. The world that language reveals is a stiffly classified, basically Aristotelian one: words appear automatically and universally to signify simple essences of 150

Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 58.

151

Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 60.

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substances such as ‘humanity’ in the case of ‘man’.152 As we shall see, this account of language left a deep impression on its philosophical readers. At times they reiterate and reinterpret its referential and essentialist ambitions, while at others they turn against it, drawing on both the revisionary intimations within logic and (often relatedly) on contemporaneous assaults on scholasticism. Some suggest that language might be structured less by the world and more by authority, by pedagogical and social concerns, and, most importantly, by human subjectivity. Locke is the most trenchant and relentless assailant. Indeed, insofar as his Essay is a logic, it is exactly the tradition we have explored in this chapter which the Essay is intended to dismantle. Locke assiduously undermines the impression given in the logics that words stand for things. He also attacks a connected assumption which is so accepted by logicians that it is rarely broadcast: that words stand for the same things for different people. It is a testament to the continuing power of scholastic logic at the end of the seventeenth century that Locke exerts so much energy in indicting it. 152

Aquinas 1998, p. 31.

chapter 2

Language in grammar

If logic discloses the heart of language, then grammar supplies the body. According to Lily’s Grammar, otherwise known as The Royal Grammar and the predominant textbook in England throughout the seventeenth century, the discipline teaches ‘the art of writing and speaking rightly’.1 As the mainstay of early-modern education, it inculcates the quintessentially human skill that distinguishes men from beasts, enabling them to flourish in society. In his influential Minerva, sive De causis Latinae linguae (1587), Franciscus Sanctius explains that grammar, ‘the art of speaking rightly’, is the most basic of the three arts of language.2 Obadiah Walker’s Of Education (1673) reiterates its propaedeutic role. Neither rhetoric nor logic, that teach one, respectively, to speak ‘perspicuously, decently, and persuasively’, and ‘pertinently and rationally’, are to be learned before the linguistic rudiments enshrined in grammar.3 Bacon records the essential, if unglamorous, nature of the discipline; it is ‘the harbinger of other sciences; an office not indeed very noble, yet very necessary’.4 In his Philosophia rationalis (1638) Thomas Campanella calls it ‘an instrumental art’.5 Pupils were expected to have mastered it at grammar school, and its preliminary status is reflected in the fact that the subject did not officially appear in the curricula of the Universities of either Oxford or Cambridge.6 Unofficially, however, undergraduates were encouraged to refresh their memories; Holdsworth urgently declares that ‘grammers must not be 1

2

3 4

The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. B1r [p. 1]; Locke not only owned this edition (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 98) as well as three versions of Lily (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 175), but also represented ‘Lily’s Grammar’ as synonymous with ‘Grammar-Schools’ in his Thoughts concerning Education (Locke 1989, p. 218). In his rendering of Lily, William Walker explains that ‘the Authority of this Nation had upon mature deliberation established this to be the only grammar, that should be learned in all the schools of England’ (Walker 1674, sig. A5r). For further evidence of its preeminence see Lily 1664, sig. A3r. Sanctius 1664, pp. 7–8; 9. Locke owned this edition, in addition to another copy of this text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 225). Walker 1970, pp. 107–10. Locke had this edition (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 262). Bacon 1857, iv, p. 440. 5 Campanella 1638, p. 1: ‘ars instrumentalis’. 6 Feingold 1997, p. 243.

41

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forgotten’.7 The art was indispensable in a world where a gentleman’s status was partly measured by his linguistic virtuosity.8 While grammar purports to teach one to speak, however, it could be judged to belie its name. According to early-modern linguistic theory, speech is definitively significative, or else it is just noise. Verbal discourse must be animated by semantic discourse. However, grammar focuses on the semiotic as opposed to the semantic properties of language.9 The art therefore threatens to impoverish its charge. It is this elevation of the form over the content of language that distinguishes the discipline from its sisters in the trivium. While logicians and rhetoricians concentrate on what words signify, grammarians often turn a blind eye to the signified, attending instead to the identification and ordering of the signs themselves. This does not mean that they take the semiotic side of language to be sufficient. Grammar is a preliminary to its sister arts, and they elaborate on meaning. Nevertheless, grammar divulges the radical dualism of res and verba that underpins early-modern philosophy of language, and the possible independence and pre-eminence of words alone. In the course of the century several writers are concerned that students are obsessed with the clothes (the words) rather than the body (the signification) of language, to use a common analogy. Grammar promotes this disjunction between oratio and ratio, and the love affair with the former that so disturbs contemporaries. This concern elicits various attempts by philosophers in general and grammarians in particular to tie verba to res. This chapter investigates how grammar exposes the inherent meaninglessness of words per se and their simultaneously inherent vitality 7 8

9

Holdsworth 1961, p. 641. On the overriding importance of becoming a master of words, and ultimately of rhetoric, see Costello 1958; Grafton and Jardine 1986, p. 211; Kristeller 1979a; Ong 1971, pp. 113–41. By stressing the grammarians’ consistent focus on the semiotic properties of language, I am questioning Padley’s narrative which traces a move from ‘formal’ to ‘semantic’ grammar (Padley 1976, p. 74) in the period 1500–1700, and which constitutes the major contribution of secondary literature on the subject. Padley (1976, p. 57) asserts the replacement of usage with ratio in the humanist tradition. Padley 1985 and 1988, i, describes the ‘semasiological’ as opposed to ‘formal’ (p. 76) development of grammar. Padley 1985 and 1988, ii, which deals with ‘vernacular norms’ (p. 3) and ‘observational’ as opposed to ‘methodical’ grammar (p. 1), says of Lily that it is ‘a good illustration of the general drift away from formal criteria in the direction of semantically based ones’ (p. 233). While there was indeed a movement (which I shall trace) to inject matter into words, this was coincident with a continuing emphasis on the signs themselves. See also Black 2001, who explains that Italian renaissance Latin education was ‘overwhelmingly philological’ rather than philosophical (p. 9). Mitchell (2001) argues that grammar was the site of controversies about standardisation, pedagogy, writing instruction, universal language and social position in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England.

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as pure signs. It then explores the disparate grammatical endeavours to ground both individual words and linguistic structure as a whole in some extra-linguistic, universal and fixed rationale. I end by analysing the view that such projects are doomed to failure given the contingent, fluid and divergent nature of human languages. the concentration on verba not res Grammarians both propagate and reflect the view that words are signs whose whole purpose is to signify something other than themselves. This generates the paradigmatic duality of sign/signified which we met in the previous chapter and which indicates the unreflective and latent fusion of concepts and things on the semantic side of the duality. In the Grammatica speculativa by Thomas of Erfurt, a leading modistic medieval grammar, a word (dictio) is ‘a significative expression (vox significativa)’.10 This description is echoed ubiquitously. In his Latine Grammar (1651), Charles Hoole, described by John Twells as a ‘new’ grammarian, defines a word as ‘a part of speech, which itself doth signifie something’.11 Of a more traditional persuasion is John Stockwood, who declares in Certaine Grammar Questions for the Exercise of Young Schollers in the Learning of the Accidence (1590), that a word is ‘a voyce consisting of one sillable or more, wherein is uttered so much as signifieth somewhat’.12 The persistent duo of sign and signified appears in various nominal guises. In English, the significant other is called ‘signification’, ‘sense’, ‘meaning’ and, most often, ‘thing’.13 The duality is described differently, depending on the particular philosophical persuasions of the grammarian. In his De causis linguae Latinae (1540), Julius Caesar Scaliger exposes his Aristotelian heritage by explaining that a vox has a ‘material’ and a ‘formal’ component, where ‘form’ denotes the essence, or anima, of a thing. ‘‘Felix’’ is one ‘‘vox’’ if you look at it ‘materially’, but three if you look at its ‘form’. That is to say, it has one phonetic existence, the word ‘felix’, and three semantic ones, its three possible genders.14 The PortRoyal Grammaire (1660), on the other hand, reveals its Cartesian roots when it distinguishes between the ‘material part’ of words (their ‘sound’) 10 12 13

14

Thomas of Erfurt 1972, p. 149. 11 Twells 1985, p. 153; Hoole 1969, p. 16. Stockwood 1590, sig. A4v. See, e.g., Stockwood (1590, sig. D2r) on ‘the signification of a word’; The True Method of Learning the Latin Tongue by the English (1696, sig. A3r) differentiates between the ‘word itself ’ and the ‘sense of the word’; Bullokar 1980, p. 54: ‘signification or meaning of words’. Hoole (1969, p. 20) says a noun ‘nameth a thing’. Scaliger 1540, p. 145.

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made by ‘men and parrots’ alike, and the ‘spiritual part’ (their signification of ‘thoughts’), to which parrots are strangers.15 Sometimes grammars fuse the semiotic and semantic qualities of language. The Royal Grammar rattles out the semantic refrain: ‘a noun is the name of a thing’. It adds the formal proviso that a noun substantive ‘needs no other word to shew its signification’.16 The definition of a verb is similarly mixed: ‘a Verb is a part of speech declined with mood and tense, and betokeneth doing . . . or suffering’.17 The English Guide to the Latin Tongue (1675) also displays this seamless movement between semiotics and semantics, this time in the case of nouns: ‘A Noun is the name of a thing . . . A noun substantive may have a, an, or the before it, and cannot have the word thing immediately after it.’18 William Walker’s reformed version of The Royal Grammar (1674) gives the impression that language is constituted by a web of both phonetic and graphic signs, and determined by extra-linguistic reference. He explains that one might know the gender of words ‘by the nature of things’. However, having declared that ‘birds, wild-beasts, and fishes generally are of the Epicene gender’, the first exception to the rule turns out to be that ‘nouns ending in um . . . are generally of the neuter gender’.19 Ben Jonson’s English Grammar (1640) defines a word in general as ‘a part of speech, or note, whereby a thing is knowne, or called: and consisteth of one, or more syllabes’.20 More often, however, this interplay between sign and sense is eclipsed by an overwhelming focus on signs alone. Res melts away, leaving the reader with a baffling maze of empty signifiers. Scaliger is explicit about the strict exclusion of res from grammar. He explains that words can be considered in terms of their ‘figure’, their ‘composition’ and their ‘truth’, and that grammarians deal with the first two elements, while dialecticians are concerned with truth, or words’ fit with the world.21 Sanctius characterises oratio in terms of its phonetic elements rather than its intentional content. It consists of voces that are made up of syllables, which are in turn made up of letters, or individual sounds.22 This depiction of grammar in particular, and language more generally, is reiterated by Hoole: ‘Grammar hath its name from letters, which the Greeks call grammata . . . for this art begins with letters, of which syllables are made; 15 16 17 19 20 21

Lancelot and Arnauld 1968, pp. 21–2. The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. B2r [p. 3]; [p. 4]. Cf. The True Method 1696, p. 5. The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. C8r [p. 31]. 18 The English Guide 1675, p. 3. Walker 1674, pp. 25; 27. Jonson 1640, p. 35. Locke owned Jonson’s Works (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 163). Scaliger 1540, p. 2. 22 Sanctius 1664, p. 8.

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and of syllables, words; and of words, a speech.’23 Language seems to spiral, self-referentially, into itself, rather than reach out to people and their world. A circular and insulated picture of discourse is promoted through the meta-verbal focus on parts of speech, and also through the emphasis on making grammatical as opposed to real or rational sense. The Royal Grammar declares that ‘syntax . . . teacheth how to join words rightly together in sentences’, and defines a conjunction as ‘a part of speech which joineth words and sentences together’.24 The True Method of Learning the Latin Tongue (1696) explains that ‘a verb is a part of speech, which joyns a noun to a noun, or a noun to an adjective’.25 Much grammatical analysis of language therefore occurs at a purely surface level, and makes sparse reference to the semantic components of speech. The view of language as a tissue of insignificant signs, promoted, albeit inadvertently, by the grammarians, is compounded by their emphasis on the sensible aspect of words. At the base of early-modern philosophy of language lies the principle that men cannot communicate their ideas mind to mind and are therefore forced to use sensible entities – sounds and marks – which can signify insensible ideas. Words are a sensible conduit for intelligible matter, as George Dalgarno announces in his Tables of the Universal Character (1657): The soules of men, though of a spirituall and heavenly substance; yet in respect of that neare and strict union betwixt them and their bodies which they are in this state of mortality, are not able to act & exert their intellectuall faculties, without the ministration of the corporeall organs of the inferiour faculties of the senses; the chief servants the body does afford the soule, are the eare and the eye, the one carrying in upon the understanding the species of things by the signes of variously and artificially modulated sounds; the other from the like artificial variation of figures.26

Grammarians devote a large amount of space to the audible and graphic identity of words. Their discipline is divided into four parts, as enumerated in Twells’ Grammatica reformata (1683): ‘orthographia, prosodia, etymologia, syntaxis’. Orthography ‘teaches the nature, affections or accidents of letters’, and prosody, ‘the difference of the syllables’.27 The Royal Grammar explains that ‘a letter is a mark of a simple sound’.28 In his Pamphlet of Grammar (1586) William Bullokar praises the multiplicity of 23 25 26 27

Hoole 1969, p. 2. 24 The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. E8v [p. 64]; sig. E7v [p. 62]. The True Method 1696, p. 30. Dalgarno 2001a, p. 90. Cf. Izzo (1982) on phonology and orthography in the sixteenth century. Twells 1985, p. 158. 28 The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. B1r [p. 1].

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sounds employed by the ‘sencibl’ English tongue.29 The Port-Royal Grammaire initially concentrates not on ‘words, as significative; but only of their nature and property as sounds’.30 Hoole describes a syllable as ‘a taking letters together, and uttering them with one breath’.31 John Wallis actually appends a Grammatico-Physical Treatise on Speech (or on the formation of all speech sounds) to his Grammar of the English Language (1653). In it he explains how to pronounce different letters. This attention to the material, or sensible, aspects of discourse is also apparent in their use of ‘signs’ to identify parts of speech. John Milton’s Accedence (1669) advises that declined, as opposed to primitive, words ‘are those which have diverse endings’.32 In his Short Institution of Grammar (1674), Richard Busby explains that ‘a substantive is declined . . . with one article; as hic pater a father’.33 In his Grammatica Anglo-Romana (1687), Samuel Shaw explains how a noun’s case is unveiled by certain tell-tale signs. ‘The particle of is a sign of a genitive case’, and ‘the particles to or for put acquisitively, before a casual word, are signs of a dative case.’34 Mark Lewis offers the most elaborate version of this teaching method. His grammar is called An Essay to Facilitate the Education of Youth, by Bringing Down the Rudiments of Grammar to the Sense of Seeing (1674).35 He contends that children sense far better than they reason, and proposes using their keen faculty of sight to pick out the grammatical status of words. ‘We may know the parts of speech by sense.’ He begins with the common advice that ‘all English words which have a, the, or an before them, are nouns . . . This is obvious to sense.’ He then unfolds a further plan: ‘the child may know the parts of speech by the character the words are printed in’. By attributing to certain parts of speech certain fonts, capitals, and other visible differentials, the student is enabled to discern and remember which is which. Lewis proudly gives the following example: ‘The Arch, spread over us, is the Heaven’.36 Grammarians abstract language by classifying words themselves with yet more words. While words are always at one remove from what they signify, grammarians hoist the speaker up to a second level, widening the distance between sign and signified. John Brinsley’s Posing of the Parts (1617) reveals 29 32 33

34 35

36

Bullokar 1980, p. 52. 30 Lancelot and Arnauld 1968, p. 5. 31 Hoole 1969, p. 14. Milton 1971, p. 2. Busby 1972, p. 3. Locke owned Graece Grammatices (1647) by Busby (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 98). Shaw 1969, pp. 36; 43. Locke owned a copy of Lewis’ grammar (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 174). See also the full title of another of Lewis’ works, Vestibulum (Lewis 1675c). Lewis 1675b, sig. A1v [p. 2]; sig. A2v [p. 4].

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the triple-tiered structure that is fostered by the grammarians. He says that ‘a hand it self is not a noun: but the word signifying a hand is a noun’.37 Stockwood paints a similarly rarefied picture of language. ‘The thing itself which is called a booke is not a noun, but this woorde booke.’ The questioner in the dialogue asks ‘why doest thou put this difference betwixte the thing and the name of the thing’? The respondent replies ‘for that in grammar which teacheth the true order of speech, wee have to consider nothing but the very woords that be spoken: so that things which bee signified by these words perteyne nothing to grammar’.38 The ‘difference betwixte the thing and the name of the thing’ is further exposed by the way in which the written word is considered a sign of the spoken word. Writing is not one, but two, steps away from the world. This traditional view has its roots in Aristotle’s seminal statement that ‘written words are the signs of words spoken’.39 ‘Aristotle says rightly’, applauds Bacon, that ‘words are the images of thoughts and letters are the images of words’.40 The Port-Royal Grammaire reiterates the commonplace, ‘sounds have been pitched upon by men to signify their thoughts, and . . . they have likewise invented certain figures which should serve as signs of these sounds’.41 Jenkin Philipps explains in his introduction to the grammatical works of James Shirley (1726) that ‘letters and syllables’ are the ‘marks or signs of the several sounds we make use of, to express our notions or Idea’s to one another’.42 Words, which bear no resemblance to what they signify in their pristine audible incarnation, are even more obscure in their written form. The lines and curves on the page recede further from the world. It is this wall of sound that divides (albeit conventional) script from meaning, as well as people from each other, that the universal language theorists want to pull down. Contrary to what is often supposed, they generally reject not arbitrary signs per se, but simply the audible versions. Following Bacon, they turn from ‘words’ to ‘real characters’, which, as Francis Lodwick puts it, are ‘representations of things, and not of sounds’.43 redressing the imbalance The early-modern period resounds with complaints that words are vacuous and that they are loved and used at the expense, and to the exclusion, of things. Some of the loudest cries come from within the 37 40 43

Brinsley 1677, p. 3. 38 Stockwood 1590, sig. B3r. 39 Aristotle 1938b, p. 115. Bacon 1857, iv, p. 439. 41 Lancelot and Arnauld 1968, p. 13. 42 Shirley 1971, p. i. Bacon 1996b, p. 231; Lodwick 1972a, sig. A4r [p. 206]. Cf. Wilkins 1968, p. 21.

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grammatical tradition itself, which is not homogenous, but internally contested and negotiated. Certain reformers are disturbed by the way their discipline encourages insignificant speech. They resist the purely verbal characterisation of language, and urge that it be filled with sense. Mark Lewis’ Apologie for a Grammar inveighs against ‘the greatest Rabby with his millions of words without this knowledge [of ‘things’]’.44 In An Appeale to Truth (1622), a vehement rant against traditional grammar as both useless and obstructive, Joseph Webbe quotes one of the most eloquent and harsh of his critical forbears: Half our age, saith Montaigne, is consumed that way: we are kept foure or five years in learning to understand bare words, and to join them into clauses; then, as long in proportioning a great bodie extended into foure or five parts; and five yeares more at least, ere we can succinctly knowe how to mingle, joyn, and interlace them handsomely into a subtile fashion, and into one coherent orb.45

Montaigne here charges grammarians with religiously constructing a beautiful but self-consuming verbal circle that has no passage to the world. Not only are their words metaphysically vacuous, but also sprung from a dead language, Latin. John Milton’s re-definition of grammar reflects the concern to inject sense into sound: ‘the art of right understanding, speaking, or writing Latine’.46 His insertion of ‘understanding’ into the definition that traditionally includes only ‘speaking’ and ‘writing’ echoes a general plea to adjoin mental to verbal discourse. John Dury, for example, of the Hartlib circle, accuses traditional grammar of introducing students, ludicrously, to ‘the materiall sense of words’ in advance of ‘the formall coherence of things which their construction is to represent’.47 An Examen of the Way of Teaching the Latine Tongue (1669) makes a similar protest, asserting that standard Latin teaching stunts learning because ‘it hath needlessly engag’d us to preferre the knowledg of words to that of things (which is a great Evill)’.48 In his Apologie Lewis urgently indicates the hellish consequences of embracing words and neglecting content. ‘All methods ought to be so contrived to shorten Art in gathering words more timely to relish things, that we may understand ourselves in affairs of our present and everlasting concernment.’ Lewis paints a familiar portrait of grammatical training resulting in an empty-headed fool who speaks without ‘ideas of things in his mind’.49 John Robotham’s letter to the reader that he prefixes to his edition of Comenius’ Janua linguarum reserata . . . The 44 47

Lewis 1675d, p. 36. Dury 1970, p. 162.

45 48

Webbe 1967, p. 18. 46 Milton 1971, p. 1. An Examen 1969, p. 16. 49 Lewis 1675d, pp. 31; 36.

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Gate of Languages Unlocked (1631) likewise bemoans the way in which traditional grammar propagates ‘a meer verbalist’, as opposed to ‘the perfection of a realist’.50 He asserts that grammarians teach their students insignificant words. ‘No marvell if it be so long before wee can reach the pith of matter, when so much time is mis-spent in the bark of words’. He delivers the following ‘generall maxime’ for a student: ‘that he learns no more than hee understands; that the end of his pains is not words, but matter’. The same principle is trumpeted in Comenius’ aptly named textbook Orbis sensualium pictus (1658): ‘I say, and say it again aloud, that this last is the foundation of all the rest: because we can neither act nor speak wisely, unlesse we first rightly understand all things which are to be done, and whereof, we are to speak.’51 The entreaty that one’s speech must not outstretch one’s knowledge is so urgent (and is reiterated by Locke with such force) because it is merely normative, not descriptive. Reformers attempt to remedy the deficit of res by using the vernacular to teach Latin.52 The Royal Grammar had traditionally taught Latin grammar in Latin – a dead and foreign tongue, unintelligible to young English pupils. In his grammar Shaw attacks ‘the multitude of grammars’ that use Latin as the means as well as the end of grammatical training. He therefore writes his in English, ‘so children might learn a language which they know not, by one that they know’.53 In his Vestibulum technicum . . . wherein, the Sense of Janua Linguarum Is Contained, Lewis too inveighs against traditional grammar: ‘it is crime enough that it is in Latin’,54 while Philipps comments on the futility of the work of reformers like Sanctius and Scioppius whom we shall encounter below. Their endeavours are, he claims, ‘of no use to children and beginners, because written in Latin; for to teach Latin by Latin Rules is to explain one obscurity by another, and therefore very ridiculous in it self ’.55 An Examen also complains about using Latin to learn Latin. It suggests that students instead learn the rules in their mother tongue.56 In the same vein, Milton proffers his Accedence as an effective route to Latin grammar, in place of the standard and strange one where pupils learn ‘first the Accedence, then the Grammar in Latin, ere the Language of those Rules be understood’. His conversion of the rules into English entails that ‘the long way is much abbreviated, and the 50

51 52

53

Comenius 1643, sig. c4r. Locke possessed three editions of Comenius’ text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 114). Ianua is the name of the ‘fundamental Italian textbook of elementary education’ in Latin in medieval and renaissance Italy (Black 2001, p. 7). Comenius 1643, sig. c4r; sig. c6r; Comenius 1968, p. 90. See Waswo (1999b) on the rise of the vernacular in the Renaissance; Johnson (1944) on the neologising and latinising of English in the sixteenth century. Shaw 1969, sig. A5r. 54 Lewis 1675c, p. 6. 55 Shirley 1971, p. iii. 56 An Examen 1969, p. 27.

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labour of understanding much more easie’.57 Brinsley is in the vanguard of reformers who convert Lily’s rules into English.58 He is motivated not only to illuminate Latin, but also to enrich the pupils’ understanding of their own tongue. He includes specifically English grammatical advice, such as the tip that one can know a ‘noun adjective’, ‘if I may put this word thing to it’.59 Wallis takes the revolutionary step of writing a specifically English grammar – his Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae of 1653 (albeit written in Latin!). Many grammars are, indeed, written in both Latin and English, to shed light on the unknown through the known. For example, William Clare organises his Compleat System of Grammar English and Latine (1690) in two columns, English on the left and Latin on the right, whereas Hoole’s Latine Grammar is advertised as a reformed version of Lily, and consists of a facing page translation. In his Universal Character (1657), Cave Beck recommends that his character be learned ‘in the nature of Comenius’s Janua set forth with the vulgar language on one side, and the character on the other’.60 In his version of Comenius’ Vestibulum Novissimum Linguae Latinae (1647), J. Brookbank explains the merits of learning Latin through English.61 In addition to the mainstream recourse to the vernacular to make grammar and language more intelligible, there is a marginal, more radical movement that emerges in the second half of the seventeenth century. This movement rejects as too limited the reforms I have outlined because they keep the discipline at the level of inherently unintelligible words. According to these ‘new’ grammarians, words per se are opaque to children. As arbitrary signs they tell us nothing about their meanings. At ‘the Entrance’ to his Janua linguarum, Comenius asks the rhetorical question: ‘do not also the characters and draughts . . . of letters look like the wonderfull strange sights to little children at the first shew’.62 This revolutionary group of educationalists are thorough-going empiricists and believe that children can only learn language though their senses. They take their cue from the Aristotelian dictum that ‘there is nothing in the understanding which was not first in the sense’.63 It is this belief that motivates Lewis’ visual differentiation of the parts of speech. ‘Things not brought down to childrens capacities by sense, are like confused objects . . . Instruction of children ought to be . . . made so plain, that 57 60 62 63

Milton 1971, sig. A2r. 58 Padley 1985 and 1988, 1, p. 153. 59 Brinsley 1677, p. 4. Beck 1657, sig. B1r. 61 Comenius 1647, sigs. A4r–A8r. Comenius 1643, sig. D1r. Comenius 1968, p. 90. On the history of this tag, see Cranefield 1970.

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they may look on words as pictures. We ought to speak to children, as if we painted our words, that they may see us speak.’64 While Lewis restricts his appeal to sense to the level of language, members of the Hartlib circle extend it to meaning, thereby bypassing intrinsically obscure words and making meaning itself intelligible. John Dury proposes ostensive learning because children learn ‘single words with the observation of the things themselves’.65 Comenius’ Orbis sensualium pictus is the great example of this pedagogical endeavour. It appears in English in 1659 as Visible World, or, A Picture and Nomenclature of All the Chief Things that Are in the World, and of Mens Employment therein. Charles Hoole’s titular translation demonstrates the supreme power accorded to sight. The book consists of pictures of everything from the heavens, through nature, to the world of human artifice. Each thing is marked by its name to make a truly ‘lively and vocal alphabet’. As Comenius says, ‘pictures are the most intelligible books, that children can look upon. They come closest to nature.’ As Hezekiah Woodward explains, in his laudatory judgement on Comenius’ work, the aim is to ‘make our words as legible to children as pictures are’. The English introduction recommends that the words be further illuminated by showing children the things themselves, in order to push the meanings into the sensuous and impressionable mind. ‘And let the things named be shewed, not only in the picture, but also in themselves, for example, the parts of the body, clothes, books, the house, utensils, &c.’66 Words appear as alien squiggles to children unless they are encountered in conjunction with what they are instituted to signify.

grounding grammar While grammars are notable for flagging up the semiotic side of language, they also, to varying degrees, indicate what it might signify. Those of a more ‘philosophical’ persuasion, perhaps trying to stem the semiotic flow, devote whole treatises to the mental and real schemes that language maps. As in linguistic theory more generally, grammarians present language as predominantly made up of names – or nouns. According to Shirley, 64 65

66

Lewis 1675b, p. 2. Dury 1970, p. 162. See Webster (1970) on the educational precepts of the Hartlib circle. See also Privratska and Privratska 1994; Strasser 1994. Locke owned four works (on husbandry) by Hartlib (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 151). Comenius 1968, pp. 111; 105; 95.

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they are among ‘the most essential parts of any language’.67 This emphasis intimates two worlds, one of manufactured names and one of extra-linguistic things, one straightforwardly and mimetically laid over the other. Brinsley says that ‘a noun is the name of a thing that may be seen, felt, heard, or understood’.68 In his satirical plays about grammar and rhetoric, Words Made Visible (1679), Samuel Shaw comments on the contemporary enthusiasm for naming; Sir John Oneme, representative of knights, or nouns, replies to the charge that there are, dangerously, too many of his class, with the following rhetorical question: ‘if his Majesty will needs make a noun of every thing, that can be seen, felt, heard, or understood, how should the kingdome choose but be full of knights?’69 The fact that language is riddled with ‘names’ indicates that it is primarily considered as a reflection of something else. It is possible to distinguish two kinds of source from which language is said to stream: things in the world and concepts in the mind. As ever, the two are often neither explicitly nor, perhaps, analytically held apart, but often, bewilderingly, consume each other. Like the logicians, grammarians present language as mirroring the external world and employ the Aristotelian substance/accident dichotomy.70 Their division of nouns into substantives and adjectives is based respectively on the distinction between ‘the thing itself’, and ‘the manner, kind or quality’ of the thing.71 The ontologies that inform grammars vary according to the specific philosophical persuasion of the grammarian. Bassett Jones, in his Herm’aelogium (1659) asserts that there are three word classes. These are noun, verb and adjective, and have their ontological roots in ‘being’, ‘motion’ and ‘quality’.72 Philipps maintains that there are four kinds of words: ‘substantive’, ‘adjective’, ‘verb’ and ‘particle’. This quartet is the mirror of the world: ‘whatever exists in the whole universe, is either a thing or substance, or the manner or quality of a thing; the action of a thing, or the manner or quality of that action’.73 In L’art de parler (1676), Bernard Lamy draws a popular verbal trichotomy of nouns/adjectives/articles which maps the basic real(–mental) logical structure of subject/predicate/copula. Nouns signify ‘the substance’, such as ‘earth’, adjectives its ‘manner’, such as ‘round’, while articles ‘mark the references which things have among themselves’, such as ‘the earth is round’.74 67 70 72 74

Shirley 1971, p. 5. 68 Brinsley 1677, p. 3. 69 Shaw 1972, p. 32. E.g. Campanella 1638, p. 21. 71 The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. B2v. Jones 1970, sig. A7v. 73 Shirley 1971, p. iv. Lane (1969, p. 19) had proposed the same quartet. Lamy 1986, pp. 186; 187. Locke owned this text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 169).

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There is a simultaneous and complementary move among grammarians to offer the mind as the source of universal grammatical structure. While grammarians are often far from explicit about mental signification, which hides under the general term ‘thing’, they do reiterate the commonplace that words signify the thoughts of the speaker. For example, John Stockwood explains that ‘speech . . . is a pronouncing of words together, wherein every man and woman speaking to each other, use to utter their myndes’.75 As Lamy puts it in his grammatical section, ‘the idea’s present to our mind . . . are the soul of our words’.76 The True Method introduces its discussion of syntax with the following familiar belief: ‘the words of humane speech are the marks by which we make our thoughts known to others’.77 Beyond this general characterisation of speech as an expression of thought, grammarians, resembling the logicians again, assert that the structure of language is informed by mental operations. One class of words that all grammarians agree signifies a certain kind of mental activity is the interjection. It is, according to Twells, ‘a virtual sentence, where the noun and the verb are contracted into an undigested word, which word betokeneth some motion or affection of the mind’.78 The Royal Grammar defines an interjection as ‘a word expressing some passion of the mind’.79 Bullokar offers the same definition and gives the examples: ‘Sorrow: as, alas: how; Fear: as, oh: O-Lord; Wonder: as, Whough: good-Lord ’.80 Grammar blurs completely with logic when grammarians attest to a conformity between verbal and mental discourse. While we might think this derives from logic, Lane argues in his Key to the Art of Letters (1700), in defence of his use of logical terminology, that he is only returning it to its original place. ‘I am perswaded that Aristotle borrowed them first from Grammar, which was in being long before his Logic, which I think . . . to be nothing else but Grammar . . . the Art of thinking and speaking are not two, but one Art . . . speaking being nothing else but vocal thoughts, and thoughts but silent speaking.’81 The synchronised acrobatics of logic animate grammar. Language appears as made up of subjects and predicates, and the copula which affirms or denies them of each other. The Grammatica speculativa explains that parts of speech are compounded ‘for the purpose of 75 78 81

Stockwood 1590, sig. B2r. 76 Lamy 1986, p. 181. 77 The True Method 1696, p. 57. Twells 1985, p. 160. 79 The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. E8r. 80 Bullokar 1980, p. 51. Lane 1969, p. xvii. See Panaccio (1999a) on grammar and mental language.

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expressing a compound concept of the mind’.82 Campanella claims that a word (vocabula) signifies a simple mental concept, and that discourse (oratio) manifests complex concepts of the soul.83 While we would expect this kind of explanation from these two ‘philosophical’ sources, we also find echoes in Bullokar’s Grammar. He divides conjunctions into ‘copulatives affirmatively, as and: also’, and ‘copulatives negatively, as nor: neither: not yet’.84 According to The True Method, ‘a proposition is a perfect sentence, or speech wherein something is affirmed, or denied of another’. It goes on: a ‘substantive in the nominative case’ that ‘comes before the principal verb’, ‘is called a subject’, and ‘all that follows it is called the predicate’, while ‘the verb is the copula that joyns them together’.85 Grammarians believe that every unit of language ought to symbolise one unit of thought. Like logicians, they note that there may not be a perfect symmetry. They exemplify their point with ellipsis, when a word is omitted but a mental term understood.86 However, they claim that language can always be filled out, or rationalised, to disclose an exactly replicated mental configuration. The aim and the expectation is that each word should signify a single thought – an assumption that Locke will denounce as deeply misleading. The Port-Royal Grammaire, adduced by Chomsky as the Cartesian precursor to his own deep structure theory, is really only developing the old grammatico-logical tradition that sees linguistic discourse as a copy of mental discourse.87 The Grammaire begins by stating that ‘knowledge of what passes in the mind, is necessary to comprehend the foundation of grammar: and on this depends the diversity of words which compose discourse’. It divides words into two basic classes, one signifying ‘the objects’ and the other ‘the manner of our thoughts’. It explains that the essence of a verb is ‘affirmation’. It maintains that there are three mental operations: ‘perception’, ‘judgment’ and ‘reasoning’. These have their 82

83 84 87

Thomas of Erfurt 1972, p. 277. See Pinborg 1984a, p. 254. Cf. Preston (1997) on the modern reception of the idea that there is a language of thought. Campanella 1638, pp. 13; 15. Bullokar 1980, p. 44. 85 The True Method 1696, p. 57. 86 E.g. Sanctius 1664, p. 66. Chomsky 1966, pp. 31–54. See Padley (1976, pp. 1 and 12) on the Chomskianism of the grammatical tradition dating back to Aristotle; Breva-Claramonte (1983) on the origins of PortRoyal Chomskianism in Sanctius and his own roots in modistic grammar. See also Miel (1995) on the Port-Royalists as Augustinian rather than Cartesian with their story about innate ideas and fallen signs and the non-Chomskianism of Descartes who does not differentiate between deep and surface structure, assuming that language is an accurate reflection of thought; Parish (1999, p. 479) on the Port-Royalists’ ‘logical, analytical’ as opposed to ‘usage-based view of grammar which had prevailed’; Panaccio (1999b, p. 13) on the ‘rapport’ between scholastic mental linguistics and present-day cognitive science.

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linguistic correspondents in, respectively, simple terms, propositions and syllogisms.88 As we know, it is precisely this tripartite division that underpins the tripartite organisation of logic. While it might well be the case that logic and grammar became increasingly psychological in the course of the century, on a trajectory where Port-Royal is key and which culminates in some way in Locke, the grammatical tradition as a whole had always been steeped in the logicalmentalist characterisation of language.89 Moreover, it included things squarely in the scope of language. The division between things and concepts is an important early-modern analytical division, but over-emphasising it belies the general agreement that talk about the external world involves three entities – words, concepts and things.90 This premise of early-modern philosophy of language, laid down by De interpretatione, overshadows discussions about the underlying rationale of language. The Grammatica speculativa gives an elaborate description of the interplay between the three modes: of being, understanding and signifying.91 Scaliger explains that words are signs of our ‘intellectual notions’, which are in turn signs of ‘things’.92 The Port-Royal Grammaire, far from denying the role of the external world in language, simply asserts that ‘the objects of our thoughts are either things, as the earth, the sun, water, wood, which are commonly called substances: or the manner of things, as to be round, red, hard, learned, &c. which are called accidents’.93 And Wilkins, a notoriously ‘thing’-obsessed linguist and therefore supposedly on ‘the other side’, chimes in with the mentalist refrain. Language, and ‘names’ in particular, he says, are the ‘external expression’ of ‘mental notions’ or ‘conceits’.94 Like all early-modern philosophers, grammarians maintain that words hook on to both concepts and things, even if they vary in their characterisation of the relationship between the three elements. Having made that point, it is also important to note the way that grammarians, like logicians, elide the difference between concept and 88 89

90

91 94

Lancelot and Arnauld 1968, pp. 21; 24; 97; 22–3; cf. the same claim in Lamy 1986, p. 187. While Padley (1985 and 1988, i, p. 286 and 1976, p. 209) is right to argue against Chomsky that Port-Royal has non-Cartesian antecedents, he misses the over-arching logical influence on grammar, and the increasingly psychological emphasis of logic. Padley (1985 and 1988, i) argues for a strict division of these two, claiming that in England, universal (empirical) grammarians assumed that language was ‘the mirror of things’ (p. 325), whereas on the Continent, especially in France, the rationalists proposed the mind as ‘the mirror of thought’ (p. 271). Thomas of Erfurt 1972, p. 143. 92 Scaliger 1540, p. 115. 93 Lancelot and Arnauld 1968, p. 25. Wilkins 1968, p. 20. See Padley (1985 and 1988, i, p. 369) on Wilkins as the acme of the word–thing empiricist tradition and on the Port-Royalists’ ‘isomorphism of the linguistic structure and the structure of thought’ (p. 296).

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thing, subsuming both under the title res or ‘thing’, and betraying the mentalism to which they are probably committed. The simple refrain that ‘a noun is the name of a thing’ hides the tripartite paradigm, and might lead students to a simplified and perverted view of language’s relationship with the world. In Robotham’s letter to the reader of Comenius’ Janua, we see mentalism being obliterated by the weight of the world: the expressed purpose of the book is to ‘imprint’ in the reader ‘the notion of the thing’.95 But the text itself seems to name things directly. Likewise, Philipps writes that the four word classes ‘are sufficient to express all the ideas of things, and the judgements we make’. However, he also declares that they correspond to ‘whatever exists in the whole universe’.96 An important consequence of the fact that language is taken to have one natural mental–real foundation is that it is considered to be underpinned by a universal semantics. As Aristotle had postulated in De interpretatione,97 the unity of the real and the mental arenas guarantees one semantic bedrock that is unmoved by superficial linguistic variation. Jones echoes the point. ‘As the reason is one’, he argues, ‘so is it observable, that the expression thereof in and by man is in all countries (qua reason) the same.’98 rationalising and regularising grammar There is a major debate among grammarians about whether their subject is a contingent and vagrant product of usage, or whether it is underpinned by some universal and rational order, governed by universal laws. While there are leading figures in both camps, both views sometimes come through the same texts. The second view constitutes a rejection of the irregular and use-based picture of grammar that dominates education in England. Lily, the principal textbook, consists of an extensive plethora of exceptions to rules and so undermines claims of regularity. It is riddled with divisions, accidents and moods, and paints a messy and ungoverned picture of speech.99 The great early-modern systematisers, or ‘philosophical projectours’ as The Royal Grammar calls them, adopt the view of the medieval modistae, that grammar is a science grounded on fixed and rational principles.100 95 97 99

100

Comenius 1643, sig. C5r. 96 Shirley 1971, p. iv. Aristotle 1938b, p. 115. 98 Jones 1970, sigs. A5r-v. For example, one edition of 1664 includes the ‘optative’ mood, which the rationalising Twells rejects as being simply another description of the subjunctive (Lily 1664, sig. C2r; Twells 1985, p. 165). The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. A5r; Thomas of Erfurt 1972, p. 135. See Sirridge 1995.

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Scaliger endeavours to lay out the ‘communis ratio loquendi’.101 Sanctius maintains that his grammar is gathered primarily from ‘reason’, and only secondarily from ‘testimony and use’.102 This opinion finds ample support in the seventeenth century, most notably in the Port-Royal Grammaire generale et raisone´e. It is a ‘work of reasoning’ that identifies the ‘nature’ of language. Rather than descriptions of grammatical precepts it provides explanations – for instance, that cases originate from the need to record relations between things, and that the genitive case signifies ‘the relation of a thing, which in any manner whatsoever belongs to another’.103 The popularity of the view that grammar has an underlying rationale is also indicated in the full title of Jones’ Herm’aelogium, or, An Essay at the Rationality of the Art of Speaking (1659). Explicitly following the second of Bacon’s two injunctions that were to set the universal language movement asail,104 Jones compiles a ‘philosophical grammar’ which sketches an ‘analogie between words and things, or reason’.105 Lane reiterates this belief in a universal grammar that exists ‘according to the unalterable rules of Right Reason, which are the same in all languages how different soever they be’.106 Twells undertakes a sustained attack on the disordered jumble of Lily. He prefaces his work by hallowing his rationalising forbears. He applauds Sanctius’ ‘perfect system of the Latin Grammar’. Of Gaspar Scioppius’ Grammatica Philosophica (1628) he says that it was ‘founded on . . . infallible unerring principles’. He dubs Gerhardus Joannes Vossius ‘this wise architect’, who ‘had finished the beautiful structure’. His own offering is a lean, regular text. For example, he denies that there are irregular or defective nouns ‘in Nominum Natura’.107 Thomas Farnaby writes a significantly entitled Systema grammaticum in 1641. He rationalises grammatical anomalies, and ‘reduces’ the ‘heteroclite [defective] nouns’ into their ‘several declensions’. For example ‘volo, nolo, malo, edo, fero, are regulated to the third conjugation; and the anomala tenses of them set in the margin’.108 He subsumes ‘possum’ under ‘sum’. These 101 103

104

105 107

108

Scaliger 1540, p. 136. 102 Sanctius 1664, p. 5. Lancelot and Arnauld 1968, sig. A3v; sig. A4r; pp. 36; 39. Twells also provides reasons for grammatical structure; e.g. he says of the neuter gender that ‘it was introduced . . . with very good reason, both for variety and better distinction of words’ (Twells 1985, p. 160). Bacon 1857, IV, p. 441; Bacon 1996b, p. 231. The first injunction was to inquire into notae rerum other than words, particularly real characters (Bacon 1857, iv, pp. 439–40; Bacon 1996b, p. 231). Jones 1970, sig. A6r. 106 Lane 1969, p. x. Twells 1985, pp. 155; 157; 162. The full title of this work identifies this reformist, philosophical tradition in grammar. Farnaby 1969, sig. A4r.

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schematisers appropriate the so-called ‘figurative’ or irregular aspects of grammar, such as ellipsis and pleonasm, into their perfect systems. Even outside the hard core of regularising grammarians, the discipline as a whole had traditionally been dominated by the language of the law. Even the irregular Royal Grammar employs this terminology: ‘The Rules for the Verb and Adjective are called Concords, or rules of Agreement. The Rules for the Case of the Substantive are called Rules of Government’.109 The widespread view of grammar as bound by laws underpins Shaw’s play. The cast includes King Syntaxis and his people, who personify the eight parts of speech. The entire plot is motivated by the King’s fury at his subjects’ rebellious activity. While Shaw’s point is that language is not obedient, his choice of the political analogy is instructive of the depth of feeling that it should be. The assumed regularity of language is also manifest in the belief in a natural word order. According to Stockwood, the ‘nominative case’ ‘in the naturall order of speeche commeth before the verbe’.110 In his Grammaticae puerilis Lewis patriotically explains how in English ‘the words stand in a natural order’. That is to say, ‘the substantive is the thing it self, and beginneth the period; only the adjective the manner of the thing is unusually put before it: the verb is the motion of the thing, and follows after it’.111 Lancelot and Arnauld refer to the ‘natural order’ of syntax.112 And Wilkins’ ‘Natural Grammar’ follows ‘the natural sense and order of the words’.113 Here again, it is crucial to note the assumption of universality – in this case grammatical – which underpins language. The assumption also shines through the view that languages map each other and are made up of interchangeable units. The action of translating from the vernacular into Latin, and vice versa, is a fundamental exercise for pupils.114 Jonson makes the following claim for his English Grammar: ‘we shew the copie of it, and matchableness, with other tongues’.115 In his Additional Rules in the Oxford Grammar (1680), Twells interlaces Latin and English versions. For example, ‘vox generalis the general word dat legem imposes a gender positis upon words contained infra se under it’.116 The belief that semantic and grammatical universality forms the groundwork of languages is obviously entrenched in the universal language movement. Wilkins styles his a ‘natural . . . philosophical, 109 111

112 114

The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. F1r. 110 Stockwood 1590, sig. C2r. Lewis 1675a, sig. A1v (counting title page as A1r). Locke owned the 1670 edition of this text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 174). Lancelot and Arnauld 1968, p. 150. 113 Wilkins 1968, p. 355. E.g. The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. a4r. 115 Jonson 1640, sig. E1r. 116 Twells 1680, p. 189.

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rational, and universal’ grammar which belongs ‘to the philosophy of letters and speech in general’.117 In his News to the Whole World, of the Discovery of an Universal Character, and a New Rational Language (1658), Dalgarno advertises that the ‘grammatical rules of this art . . . shall be altogether grounded upon nature and reason, without any irregularities or exceptions (which nature and reason abhors)’.118 a contingent circle I now turn to the other extreme of the debate, to those who reject the universality, rationality and naturalness of language and its grammar, and paint instead an irregular, heterogeneous and mutable picture of them. These historically-minded critics reflect, but with greater force, the usebased orientation of the higgledy-piggledy Lily. Their pronouncements also echo the humanist interest, exemplified by Valla, in practice, probabilism and history.119 For these alternative grammarians, language is not a perfect portrait of a fixed and ordered universe, but an evanescent product of diverse and contingent human communication. At best, grammar is an imperfect record of the way language works at a given moment. Born after the event, it describes rather than creates the speech of a particular community. At worst, grammar is an ill-fitting straightjacket into which speech is contorted. In its tightly regular form the so-called art of speaking bears little resemblance to living and idiosyncratic tongues. The grammarians’ subject matter wriggles out of their chains. Language appears not to be underpinned by the universal principles that are required of a science, or even an art. Webbe, one of the loudest proponents of the customary nature of language, adduces Quintilian for the view that grammar was not ‘sent from heaven when men were first formed, to give lawes of speaking; but . . . it was found out after they spake’.120 Even the great rationaliser Sanctius, quoting Seneca, affirms that grammarians ‘are the custodians, not the authors of the Latin tongue’.121 Even Wilkins, writing under the steam of the universal language movement, asserts that ‘grammar, is of much later invention then languages themselves, being adapted to what was already in being, rather 117 119

120 121

Wilkins 1968, p. 297. 118 Dalgarno 2001b, p. 110. Cf. Shapiro (1991) on the continuing influence of humanism in the seventeenth century; Milton (2000a) on the humanist enthronement of custom and authority, by contrast with the new philosophers’ rejection of it. See also Simone (1998) on the tensions between use, reason and nature in early-modern linguistics. Webbe 1967, p. 23. Sanctius 1664, p. 5: ‘grammatici enim, ut inquit Seneca, sermonis Latini custodes sunt, non auctores’.

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then the rule of making it so’.122 This derivative view of grammar does not itself impugn its philosophical pretensions; language itself might be a rational institution, from which a rational grammar might be extrapolated. However, some grammarians propose that language itself is a contingent and fluid fabrication, eluding law and reason.123 The Royal Grammar claims that Sanctius and his disciples are living in a fantasy world, ‘and that [a]n absolute universal alteration’ of the discipline that they ‘dream of, is altogether impracticable’.124 Lewis draws our attention to the accidental and fluctuating nature of his subject. He declares that ‘languages were made, and daily suffer alterations, rather by chance, than any art or contrivance’.125 The Port-Royalists have to admit that ‘custom and reason often differ’. For example, prepositions disobey the rule of marking ‘one relation’ each, the same preposition sometimes marking more than one.126 Philipps is forced to admit that ‘all tongues had their birth among the ignorant people, and use gave the stamp of authority to the most irregular expressions, and therefore ’twas not in the power of any mortal, however learn’d, to reduced them to any rules without innumerable exceptions’.127 On this view, language has a democratic authorship, and is therefore beset by foolish inconsistencies. Shaw provides an amusing illustration of the view that language disobeys the laws that grammarians seek to apply to it. His play vibrates with the anger of King Syntaxis at his subjects’ endemic revolt. One of the judges, Lego, recalls the first proud and devastating mutiny: ‘a general defection of the eight parts of speech from the great King Syntaxis, which is to this day known by the name of Confusion of Languages’. The nouns or knights are on trial for their ‘Heteroclite’ brigade who vary their genders and declensions. The verbs or nobles of the ‘defective’ variety face the charge of self-confessed insubordination. The ‘impersonalls’ are impugned because they ‘refuse to send out men into his majesties service’. The page of Lord Gymnasiarches, Lord Lieutenant of the eight classes of the realm, rudely refers to the King as he who ‘governs that ungovernable thing call’d the tongue of man’.128 As the full title suggests, Webbe’s Appeale to Truth, In the Controversie betweene Art, and Use is devoted to the disjunction between the delightful vagaries of the spoken word and the hopelessly regular art of grammar. He accuses it of being an inherently ‘deceitful’ art because it teaches the opposite of what it purports to do: ‘speaking rightly’. Grammarians do not 122 123 124 126 128

Wilkins 1968, p. 19; cf. Shirley (1971, p. i) for a reiteration of the point. See Izzo (1982, p. 336) on the renaissance inheritance. The Royal Grammar 1688, sig. A5r. 125 Lewis 1675b, sig. A1r. Lancelot and Arnauld 1968, pp. 52; 86. 127 Shirley 1971, p. ii. Shaw 1972, pp. 22; 32; 22; 23; 3.

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live in the real world but speak a peculiar, albeit ‘proper’, language. ‘Wee are bound rather to erre with the multitude, than to follow truth with two or three.’ Grammar is based on ‘custome or authority’, not reason.129 To support this claim, Webbe interlaces his statements with an impressive array of authorities. He quotes Juan Luis Vives on ‘custome’ as ‘the Lady and Mistresse of speaking’. He criticises grammarians for ‘polluting their speech with foule enormities, whil’st they follow Art, which is not capable of use, because use is various or changeable’. He relishes the derision of ‘Halvinus’, who writes that grammar is bound to fail due to the protean nature of its object. To attain perfection it would need be ‘as often renewed as new words are coined, or ould ones newly received’. Grammar would need to keep up with languages’ ‘daily alteration’ if it were to have ‘any certainty or perfection’. Moreoever, it is ‘impossible’ that it could be ‘universal’ or ‘perpetual’.130 Language is so inconstant and diverse that it eludes codification for even a moment, let alone for all tongues at all times. This view has revolutionary pedagogical consequences. If languages are purely the products of popular use, if they are irreducible to fixed rules and classifications, and if they have no rational core to penetrate, then they can be learned only by observation and practice, not by grammar. Hartlib asserts that the learning ‘of learned tongues’ is much hampered by ‘the Grammatical Tyranny of Teaching Tongues’.131 His friend Dury claims that ‘the knowledge of tongues is the proper effect of the memory and not of any reasoning ability, because they depend upon the observation only of that which is the constant custome of people’.132 In his Dissertation on Reading the Classics (1713), Henry Felton recommends that ‘a Youth’ be ‘taught to know Grammar by Books, instead of Books by Grammar’.133 Webbe contends that those who seek to learn a language by ‘learning or following grammar’ ‘labour in vaine’. Language is so riddled with ‘irregularities’ and ‘new-found exceptions’, that we better learn languages, as in other modes of behaviour, ‘by use & exercise, then by art, or precept’. He goes on to say that ‘we beginne not by art, but by nature: and proceed by use, custome, authoritie, and exercise govern’d by the eare’.134 The famous instance of a child who learnt beautiful Latin through experience is Montaigne. He is adduced by An Examen to prove that ‘rules are needless’ for learning a language, and that ‘there is nothing more natural, nor infallible’ than learning by ‘use and conversation’.135 129 132 135

Webbe 1967, pp. 32; 33; 36. 130 Webbe 1967, pp. 22–3; 20–1; 22. 131 Hartlib 1970, p. 194. Dury 1970, p. 156. 133 Felton 1971, p. 53. 134 Webbe 1967, pp. 37; 12–13. An Examen 1969, pp. 8; 7; 4.

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This attitude is partly grounded in an externalist model of personal construction. In his Compleat English Schoolmaster (1674), Elisha Coles explains that, while children have little judgement, they are ‘capable of imitation’.136 A new mind is a tabula rasa, inscribed by the chatter – generally of women – which flutters about them. According to Webbe, the Romans did not have their Lilys, but ‘were taught by use and custome, from the mouthes of nurses and other women which had the keeping of them, from their cradle, and not by Grammar, or Grammarians’.137 Obadiah Walker repeats the commonplace: ‘the nurses forme the speech, the garbe, and much of the sentiments of the child’.138 In A Childes Patrimony (1640) Hezekiah Woodward urgently exhorts parents to ‘looke well with whom the childe doth converse; there is a companion whose words fret like a gangrene, and corrupt like a plague sore, which whom the childe receives an impression quickly, which will not quickly out again . . . the breath of a wicked companion is more contagious then is unholsome ayer’.139 The view that language is the product of experience and use, that it does not originate in reason and the world, but mutates and diverges threatens the efficacy of language as it was conceived in the early-modern period. It implies that languages do not, as we have seen logicians and grammarians assume, reflect one universal mental discourse. Instead, languages appear as deeply, as well as superficially, incommensurable with each other. Somewhat surprisingly, this culturally specific view appears in Bacon’s plan for a ‘philosophical grammar’. By gathering the best words from different peoples and discovering ‘the analogy between words and things, or reason’, one might, in addition to repairing Babel, reveal the particular and divergent ‘dispositions and manners of peoples and nations’ by means of their diverse speech. Bacon takes an example from a cheeky Cicero, who had remarked that ‘the Greeks had no word to express the Latin ineptus; ‘‘because,’’ says he, ‘‘that vice was so familiar among the Greeks that they did not perceive it in themselves’’ ’.140 Webbe reiterates the point with extra force, criticising translators of the ancients for being insensitive to linguistic fragmentation and uniqueness: ‘Every tongue hath proper and peculiar words, which are neither agreeable to other tongues, or lyable to translation.’ It is not only national tongues that diverge, but also ‘sundry regions’, such as ‘Flanders, Brabant, Holland, and Zeland’.141 Commenting on this problem, as posed by Comenius’ Janua, Robotham explains how he got over the 136 139

Coles 1967, p. 103. 137 Webbe 1967, p. 26. 138 Walker 1970, p. 18. Woodward 1640, p. 43. 140 Bacon 1857, iv, pp. 441–2. 141 Webbe 1967, pp. 34; 21.

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impossibility of a straight translation. He ‘strives not to render the Latin ad verbum . . . but truly to expresse the author’s meaning in such proper words, and current phrases, as an English man will own’.142 The emergence of vernaculars focuses attention on inter-linguistic distinctions. No more the strange Latinate ‘English’ with its genders and suffixes. Jonson champions the independence of his mother tongue; he explains how English has a ninth part of speech – the articles – in addition to the Latin eight.143 The Port-Royalists are forced to admit that not every grammatical element is shared by all languages. They also use the example of articles which French has but Latin lacks.144 While grammarians themselves do not extrapolate them, the view that languages are not intertranslatable has potentially devastating consequences. If languages are not underpinned by a universal organisation, and if linguistic signs are arbitrary, and therefore inherently opaque, then language cannot be guaranteed to convey the thoughts of the speakers, nor to describe the world. It is the commonality of deep semantic structure, divergent superficies notwithstanding, that underpins both communication and external reference. Predominantly pedagogical concerns lead certain grammarians to two connected philosophical conclusions. Frustrated with the ineffectiveness of general rules to teach grammar and language, they turn to observation and practice, and form the view that language is a contingent circle, floating free of any rational or real base, and changing its consistency from moment to moment. The second conclusion emerges out of the desire to render Latin grammar intelligible by means of the vernacular, in addition to wanting to teach the vernacular in its own right. This leads to the realisation that Latin grammar is incommensurable with English, and that particular languages do not mirror each other at a deep level. These two conclusions, in conjunction with the grammarians’ strict division between res and verba, and their focus on the formal and sensible, opposed to the semantic aspect of words, threaten to present words as profoundly and necessarily unintelligible, and as completely unhinged. Language, as it is presented in grammar, juts out in two opposite directions. On the one hand, it appears, as it does in logic, full of sense and a perfect mirror of one mind–world. On the other, it seems an unanchored play of signs, blowing in the wind of contingent usage.

142

Comenius 1643, sig. C7v.

143

Jonson 1640, p. 56.

144

Lancelot and Arnauld 1968, p. 50.

chapter 3

Language in rhetoric

Rhetoric is the final art of language. Having learnt to speak and reason, students discover how to beautify their words and make them persuasive. Only then are they fully equipped to take the stage as gentlemen. Holdsworth explains the indispensability of ‘Oratory’, ‘without wch: all the other learning though never so eminent is in a manner voide & useless, without those you will be bafled in your disputes, disgraced, & vilified in Publicke examinations, laught at in speeches, & Declamations’.1 Succeeding her sister arts, rhetoric is the grand finale, by which one learns how to express what one thinks clearly and convincingly. It is therefore the art that deals most fully and explicitly with the human act of speaking, with the production of impressive, sensible words and with the audience. While rhetorical presentation of language is rooted in standard linguistic assumptions, it probes them and exposes points of vulnerability that cause concern about language in general. For example, tropes expose the fragility of the semantic contract that joins words to meanings; the essence of a trope is that it pulls words apart from their designated meanings, and applies them elsewhere. The deeply rhetorical culture in which early-modern elites are entrenched unmasks language in a way that simultaneously impresses and horrifies them. What is early-modern rhetoric? Despite the proliferation of vernacular treatises on rhetoric in the later sixteenth century and their continued production throughout the seventeenth, it is still the ancients to whom students are officially and enthusiastically guided. In the main, they are 1

Holdsworth 1961, p. 637. I shall use ‘oratory’ and ‘eloquence’ almost interchangeably with ‘rhetoric’, although there are arguably important distinctions, ‘oratory’ emphasising speech (as opposed to writing), and eloquence (especially in the seventeenth century) elocutio. On the continuing centrality of rhetoric in the seventeenth century see Feingold 1997, p. 248; Murphy 1981, p. ix; Murphy 1983; Skinner 1996; Vickers 1994. For summaries of the state of the subject at that time see Abbott 1983; Conley 1990, chapter 6, Kristeller 1983.

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directed to models rather than explanations of eloquence,2 encouraged to acquaint themselves with an eclectic choice of styles, although there is an increasing predilection for the ‘plain style’ towards the end of the century. Locke’s own advice on how to teach ‘the art of speaking well’ is that ‘we are more apt to learn by example, than by direction’.3 He goes on to cite Cicero, Terence, Virgil, Livy and Caesar, specifying the best editions. However, in addition to these exemplars, Locke also recommends some manuals. ‘If anyone hath a mind to consult the masters of speaking, and writing’, Locke advises Cicero’s De oratore and Orator, and Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria.4 This pair, in addition to the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium, are the ‘three principal authorities’ for (classical) eloquence.5 The other great antique text is Aristotle’s Rhetoric. This differs from the Roman texts in focusing on probable reasoning, rather than persuasion of the audience by stylistic and emotional methods. Aristotle disapproves of arguing by means which are extrinsic to the matter in dispute. His dry enthymemes (probable syllogisms) are neither pugnacious nor seductive. While Roman writers do deal with the discovery of arguments, it is only part of the battery that enables the orator to win the war of words, and becomes even less consequential in seventeenth-century rhetoric.6 Where Aristotle’s text is crucial is in its extensive typology of the passions. It proves so influential that even Locke directs budding gentlemen to it for self-knowledge, and has a copy in his library.7 Intimate understanding of the passions is of the utmost importance for the orator who wants his audience to love his cause. In the main, however, it is the ornate Roman art of persuasion that the humanists recover. But by the end of the seventeenth century, the subject is a conflicted shadow of its former self. It is possible to identify two principal guises. In the first, the five classical parts of rhetoric are whittled down to one: elocutio – the figures and tropes – which works wonderful magic on an audience. This part was already central in the ad Herennium and comes almost entirely to constitute the discipline.8 The main reason 2

3 4 5 6

7 8

Feingold’s treatment of rhetoric in Oxford in the seventeenth century focuses on the exemplarity approach (Feingold 1997, pp. 249; 251). Locke 1997, p. 351. Locke 1997, p. 351. Locke owned De oratore (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 108). Skinner 1996, p. 35. This element (inventio) was inserted into logic in the sixteenth century. See Serjeantson (1999) on the continuing importance of testimony and proof more generally in early-modern England. Locke 1997, p. 354; Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 75. Cf. Green 1994. See Skinner (1996, pp. 55–65) on the specialisation of rhetoric.

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for this near-total eclipse of the remaining four parts of rhetoric is the rhetoricisation of logic by Agricola, Ramus and Talon, whereby inventio (discovery of arguments) and dispositio (judicial arrangement of arguments) were moved from rhetoric into logic.9 Of the remaining elements, memoria and pronuntiatio were sidelined by the printing revolution.10 Spoken oratory continued to be important in the pulpit and the assembly, but is little considered in the textbooks.11 Dudley Fenner’s The Artes of Logike and Retorike (1584), an example of vernacular Ramism, divides ‘Rhetorike’, ‘an arte of speaking finely’, into ‘Garnishing of speech, called Eloquution’, and ‘Garnishing of the manner of utterance, called Pronounciation’.12 The battle for prominence between pronuntiatio and elocutio is dramatized in Shaw’s Words Made Visible, where the two personae fight it out. Ellogus (elocution) wins such an unassailable victory that the children of Eclogus (pronounciation), Voice and Gesture, are too frightened even to take the field in defence. The great bulk of English rhetorics concentrate almost exclusively on elocutio, as indicated by the following titles: The Tropes and Figures of Scripture (Thomas Swynnerton, c. 1537–8), A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (Richard Sherry, 1550), A Declaration of all such Tropes, Figures, or Schemes (Angel Day, 1595), The Mysterie of Rhetorique Unvail’d, wherein above 130 the Tropes and Figures Are Severally Derived from the Greek into English (John Smith, 1657), The Treatise of the Figures (John Stockwood, 1674). William Dugard’s Rhetorices elementa (printed nine times between 1640 and 1669), splits rhetoric into ‘elocutio’ and ‘pronunciatio’, and proceeds to discuss only the former.13 The second kind of eloquence that gains ground as the century progresses moves in an opposite direction. It rejects the technicality of elocutio, with which rhetoric as a whole had become identifiable, and redescribes the discipline as a natural, plain – albeit persuasive – art of speaking.14 This simple characterisation had always underpinned the discipline; Quintilian defines it as bene dicendi scientia.15 But while 9 10 11 13

14

15

See Monfasani (1988) on humanist treatment and transformation of rhetoric. Memory was also increasingly regarded as an art in itself (see Skinner 1996, p. 58). See Monfasani 1988, p. 205; Shuger 1993, p. 122. 12 Fenner 1584, sig. D1v. Dugard 1972, p. 1. See Murphy (1981, p. 133) on the republication of this text 1640–69. Two exceptions are Thomas Wilson’s vernacular exemplar of full-bodied classical eloquence in his Arte of Rhetorique (1554), and Obadiah Walker’s Instructions concerning the Art of Oratory that hits the presses as late as 1659. See Jones (1951 and 1971) on anti-rhetorical speech; Patterson (1970, p. xiv) on the importance of stylistic ‘decorum’ in the sixteenth century; Croll (1971) on the fluorescence of ‘attic prose’; Gaukroger (2001, p. 126) on the Royal Society’s distinctive emphasis on plain, natural speech. Quintilian 1920–22, I, p. 301. Locke had two copies of the Institutio (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 217).

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Quintilian had wavered between this innocent characterisation and the darker vis persuadendi, the modern, self-consciously plain-speakers trumpet their departure from enchantment. One member of this movement is Bernard Lamy, whose L’art de parler we have already met as a grammar, so basic are its avowed aims. Like the new natural logicians, Lamy privileges the natural light – the irresistible darling of the new philosophy – over the artificial precepts of the textbooks: ‘as to the ordering of words, and the rules to be observed in ranging a discourse, Natural light directs us so clearly, that no man can be ignorant’.16 ‘Having all of us one and the same nature, (be the language that we speak what it will)’, he writes later, ‘we follow all those rules which we have shown to be natural, and essential to the art of speaking’. The emphasis is on words that effectively communicate reasoned matter rather than on an excessive play of words that elicits certain emotions. Lamy even divides ‘the art of speaking’ from ‘the art of persuasion’, admitting that ‘both are comprehended under the name of Rhetorick by several great Masters’. He distinguishes the two arts on the following grounds: ‘every man who speaks well, has not the secret of working upon the Affections, or working to his side, such as were before of contrary opinion; and this is call’d to perswade’.17 Locke is firmly in Lamy’s camp. For him the ‘art of speaking well, consists chiefly in two things, viz. perspicuity and right reasoning’.18 Joseph Glanvill is an alternative representative of the new rhetoric. In his Essay concerning Preaching (1678) he continues to define the end of rhetoric as ‘to persuade men’.19 However, he says that this is to be achieved by plainspeaking, which he defines in opposition to the flourishes of elocutio, and thereby redescribes eloquence out of all recognition. the core linguistic precepts of rhetoric: significance and communication Rhetoric embodies paradigmatic early-modern philosophy of language: by convention, words signify concepts that in turn might signify things. In his Directions for Speech and Style (c. 1599), John Hoskins explains that ‘the conceits of the mind are pictures of things and the tongue is interpreter of those pictures’.20 However, rhetoricians tend to conflate this triptych into the duplicitous duality we have already seen reverberate

16 19

Lamy 1986, p. 198. Glanvill 1703, p. 23.

17

Lamy 1986, pp. 202; 343. Hoskins 1935, p. 2.

20

18

Locke 1997, p. 350.

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through the first two trivial disciplines.21 Quintilian writes that ‘every speech . . . consists at once of that which is expressed and that which expresses, that is to say of matter and words (rebus et verbis)’.22 In his Arte of Rhetorique (1554) Wilson, who might be expected to steer away from these indeterminate concept–object ‘things’, uses the catch-all semantic term and explains that ‘apt words’ are those ‘that properly agree unto that thyng, which thei signifie’.23 On the spectrum of res, from concepts to things, where logicians, whose eyes are often turned toward nature, appear to subsume concepts under ‘things’, rhetoricians, located firmly in the human sphere, often emphasise the intentional rather than the referential aspect of signification. Lamy declares that ‘discourse is the image of the mind’.24 Rhetoric is accused of manufacturing a redundancy of words, a semantic vacuum, or what Thomas Sprat calls ‘this superfluity of talking’.25 Bacon has the imitative slaves of Ciceronian style in mind when he says that the ‘first distemper of learning’ is ‘when men study words and not matter’.26 Joshua Poole provides a wonderful example of this kind of verbal surfeit in his Practical Rhetoric (1663). Although he claims that he imparts ‘plenty of words and matter’,27 he glosses six sentences in the course of 202 pages, in a cornucopian emulation of Erasmus. The first sentence – ‘love overcometh all things’ – is followed by a flood of synonymous ones, such as ‘all things are overcome by love’, ‘Venus’ Son overcomes all things’, and ‘Good God! How do all things lye crouching at the feet of love!’28 Displays like this elicit the cutting scorn of Shaw, who has Pronunciation say of Invention: ‘thou canst speak non-sense so ingeniously’. Later on, Trope describes ‘those babbling things call’d words’, adding that ‘we have made a wide difference between words and things’.29 Aware of the charge of vacant words, and echoing a perennial concern about language more generally, rhetoricians stress that res must fill verba. 21

22 25 26

27

See Howell, A. C. (1971) on the humanist understanding of res as ‘subject matter’ rather than ‘things’, as, he shows, the new scientists begin to understand it. Vickers 2002 brilliantly identifies two ways of representing language in the Renaissance. He names as ‘rhetorical’ the duality of verba and res (meaning or subject matter) and ‘linguistic’ the ultimately Aristotelian triad of word, concept and thing. He argues, contra certain secondary commentators, that these two were quite compatible and ran concurrently ‘for over two thousand years’ (p. 286). Quintilian 1920–22, i, p. 397. 23 Wilson 1560, fo. 84v. 24 Lamy 1986, p. 305. Sprat 1959, p. 111. Locke owned this text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 238). Bacon 1996b, p. 139. See Vickers (2000) on how Bacon’s ‘first distemper’ is not directed against humanism in general, but is an intervention ‘in a debate over imitatio carried out within humanism’ (p. 141). Cf. Vickers (1968) on Bacon’s literary strategies; Vickers (1996) on Bacon’s complex treatment of rhetoric; Briggs (1989) on Bacon’s conception of a rhetorical science which persuades the truth out of nature; Steadman (1971) on Bacon’s self-heroising rhetorical strategies. Poole 1972, sig. A6r. 28 Poole 1972, pp. 1; 2; 6. 29 Shaw 1972, pp. 105; 109.

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Cicero declares that ‘a knowledge of very many matters must be grasped, without which oratory is but an empty and ridiculous swirl of verbiage’.30 ‘I would have the orator’, says Quintilian, ‘while careful in his choice of words, be even more concerned about his subject matter’.31 Renaissance rhetoricians also adopt this somewhat defensive stance. Erasmus has Bulephorus say: ‘let our first concern be for ideas, our second for words; and let us fit words to things, and not the other way round . . . A speech will really come alive if it is born in our hearts, not if it floats on our lips.’32 Erasmus is employing a standard trope that characterises res as the soul of speech, without which it dies. He echoes Augustine’s demand for the verbum cordis, the internal word that animates, or gives meaning to the sounds we utter. When Sherry urges that words be ‘apt’, he explains that this is less a quality of words themselves than ‘the strength and power of the signification: & must be considered not by hearyng, but understandyng’.33 The claim that res are essential to verba is matched by an equally firm insistence that without verba, res are imprisoned and useless.34 Speech is the escape from our solitary confinement. Through words and gesture we open our minds and hearts to others.35 As Agricola says, ‘if speech is a sign of the things which are contained in the mind of him who speaks, then it follows that its proper task is to show and bestow these contents of speech’.36 The proposition that language publicises the private contents of the mind and that twentieth-century philosophy of language associates with Locke, had been established for centuries. Indeed, in his Garden of Eloquence (1577) Henry Peacham presages Locke when he inserts divine teleology into language: the sine qua non of society. ‘The Lord God hath ioyned to the mind of man speech, which he hath made the instrument of our understanding, & key of conceptions, whereby we open the secreates of our hartes, & declare our thoughts to other.’37 In De eloquentia sacra et humana (1619), Nicholas Caussin explains that eloquent speech – ‘the seed of heaven’ – implements mutual nurturing while the ‘mute herds’ 30 33 34

35

36

37

Cicero 1942, i, p. 13. 31 Quintilian 1920–22, iii, p. 189. 32 Erasmus 2000, p. 73. Sherry 1961, p. 20. See Tuck (1998, p. 17) on the humanists’ view that ‘philosophy could not be understood nor taught in isolation from rhetoric’; Menn (1998, p. 43) on the (Ciceronian) importance of yoking wisdom to eloquence. For example, Cicero (1942, ii, p. 177) singles out the eyes as having as many significationes as there are emotions; Wilson 1560, fos. 112v–13r. Agricola 1538, pp. 10–11: ‘Quod si est signum rerum, quas is qui dicit animo complectitur, oratio, liquet hoc esse propriu opus ipsius, ut ostendat it atque orationis indulserit munus?’ See Rebhorn (2000, p. 42) on the remarkable number of editions of this text that were published in the sixteenth century (over 40 between 1515 and 1579). Peacham 1971, sig. Aiir. Cf. Locke 1975, p. 402 (iii. i. 1–2).

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remain atomised.38 Language enables individuals to enrich one another’s lives in ways unavailable to beasts.39 Caussin is alluding to Cicero’s story in his De inventione which describes the genesis of the peaceful civitas as wrought by reason armed with rhetoric, transforming people ‘from wild savages into kind and gentle folk’. Cicero’s influential point is that ‘a mute and voiceless wisdom’ is powerless.40 This assessment of language as indispensable in communication and transfigurative in effect reverberates down the centuries. Eloquence is described as language at its best, as making res perfectly evident. The speaker’s words ought to be ‘plain’, to lead the audience directly to the ideas of the speaker. Quintilian says that the ‘prime virtue’ of speech is ‘clearness (perspicuitas)’.41 The etymology of Quintilian’s goal is instructive; one ought to perceive the matter through the words with a quasivisual clarity. Aristotle had already laid down the law on the importance of lucidity. A ‘chief merit’ of ‘style’ is ‘perspicuity’. ‘If [speech] does not make the meaning clear, it will not perform its proper function.’42 According to Cicero, the orator must speak ‘lucidly (plane)’.43 The ad Herennium insists that topics must be expressed ‘with purity and perspicuity (pure et aperte)’.44 Here, the Latin suggests that language ought to open to reveal its intentional contents. The early-modern rhetoricians vociferously encourage the pursuit of plainness. This drive motivates John Bulwer’s Chironomia. or, The Art of Manuall Rhetoricke (1644), which appeals to naturally expressive gesture. Wilson instructs the orator to use ‘plain wordes’.45 Sherry says ‘the proper use of speech is to utter the meaning of our mynde with as playne wordes as may be.’46 In his Instructions concerning the Art of Oratory (1659) Walker asserts that no matter what style you choose, ‘perspicuity’ or ‘to be understood’ ought to be the orator’s top priority.47 There are two things that – contradictorily – make rhetorical speech perfectly plain: common use and elocutio. Esteem for common use had always been a hallmark of humanism, and rhetoricians advertise their strict adherence to it.48 It is, after all, the only thing that makes words 38

39 40

41

42 45 48

Caussin 1630, p. 3: ‘semen coeli’; p. 4: ‘totum nostrum est; in huius laudis societatem non mutae pecudes sese offerunt’. Holdsworth (1961, p. 644) says of this text that ‘no piece of scholarship is more usefull, & necessarie’ to the study of oratory. Cicero 1942, i, p. 25; Cf. Quintilian 1920–22, i, pp. 323–5. Cicero 1976, p. 7. Cf. Wilson (1560, fos. Aviiv-viiiv) and Bacon (1858, pp. 721–2) for early-modern repeats of the tale. Quintilian 1920–22, i, p. 131. See Vickers (1999, p. 41) on clarity as the prime virtue of language in the Renaissance. Aristotle 1926, p. 351. 43 Cicero 1942, ii, p. 31. 44 Rhetorica ad Herrenium 1954, p. 269. Wilson 1560, fo. Aiv. 46 Sherry 1961, p. 13. 47 Walker 1682, p. 98. See Monfasani (1999) on ‘consuetudo’ as the sole norm of language in the renaissance (p. 403).

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publicly meaningful in the first place: words are connected to their meanings by human ‘consent’, as Puttenham puts it in The Arte of English Poesie (1589).49 Lamy declares that ‘custom is the master and soveraign arbiter of all languages’.50 Sounds are meaningless unless their speakers and hearers understand what they have been instituted to signify. By religiously following the vagrant contracts of speech communities, rhetoricians ensure that their words illuminate things as straightforwardly and immediately as possible. The ad Herennium explains that language achieves ‘clarity (explanatio)’ if it uses ‘current terms (usitatis verbis)’, which ‘are such as are habitually used in everyday speech’.51 Hobbes, the author (?) of the Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique (1637), explains that a word obtains ‘perspicuity’ if it is ‘proper’.52 Wilson is proud that ‘wee never affecte any straunge inkehorne termes, but so speake as is commonly received’.53 Rhetoricians contrast themselves with the unintelligible and sophistic dialecticians. They are men of the world, citizens who speak properly. Using a common analogy between money and language, Quintilian maintains that ‘usage . . . is the surest pilot in speaking, and we should treat language as currency minted with the public stamp’.54 Words should be rigidly fixed to their meanings, just as coins must live up to their (face) values. Congruent with the submission to propriety is anxiety about vulgarity. ‘Speech’, says Puttenham, ‘is fully fashioned to the common understanding’.55 The opinionated and ignorant majority literally make sense of words. Language reflects the poor minds of its instigators. Quintilian raises the alarm; if usage, he writes, ‘be defined merely as the practice of the majority, we shall have a very dangerous rule affecting not merely style but life as well’. ‘In speech we must not accept as a rule of language words and phrases that have become a vicious habit with a number of persons.’ He concludes by strictly defining usage ‘as the agreed practice of educated men’.56 Early-modern rhetoricians inherit both Quintilian’s unease and his solution. Lamy is troubled by the conflict between progressive wisdom and popular usage but he worms around the obligation to propriety. He denies that raising ‘custom to the throne . . . of all languages’ entails putting ‘the sceptre into the hands of the populace’ and ‘bad custom’. Instead, sovereign custom is that of ‘good speakers’.57 Elite 49 50 52

53 56

Puttenham 1589, p. 120. See Vickers (1988) on the continuity between rhetoric and poetry. Lamy 1986, p. 203. 51 Rhetorica ad Herennium 1954, p. 271. Cf. Cicero 1942, i, p. 11. Hobbes 1986, p. 108. While the Latin paraphrase of Aristotle’s Rhetoric is substantially Hobbes’ work, Karl Schuhmann has showed that the English translation is probably not. See Skinner 2002c, p. 4. Wilson 1560, fo. 82v. 54 Quintilian 1920–22, i, p. 113. 55 Puttenham 1589, p. 120. Quintilian 1920–22, i, p. 133 (my emphasis). 57 Lamy 1986, p. 204.

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jargon has to be coined to denominate or communicate something precisely, and it is this that we must follow.58 Linguistic ‘propriety’ is therefore learned, not rude. However, this confident appeal to the consensus bonorum could be perceived as an attempt to square the circle, shirking the consequences of a fundamental principle of language – that words only come to mean anything by common use, and individuals are therefore powerless against the tide of popular linguistic legislation. Lamy realises this, despondently ending his discussion of the forces that create language with an admission (that in some ways Locke will repeat) that the masses have us by the nose. We must ‘submit to the tyranny of custom’.59 This is an acute reflection on the invincibly democratic nature of language. The second element that endows rhetorical speech with peculiar clarity is elocutio. This would seem to contradict everything I have just said about the importance of common use: tropes explicitly break the contracts that create meaning. In his Institutiones rhetoricae (1523) Melanchthon explains that a trope is the ‘mutation’ of a word from its ‘proper to another signification’.60 Running roughshod over propriety, rhetoricians professionally block the only gateway to communication, maintaining that well-considered impropriety paradoxically makes the matter more plain than ever. Lamy is aware of the contradiction. Hyperbolic statements such as ‘swifter than the wind’ are ‘in strictness . . . lyes, but they are innocent lyes, and deceive no body: for no one but understands what we mean’.61 Sherry repeats the counterintuitive thought that ‘to set out the matter more plainly we be compelled to speake otherwise then after common facion’.62 Tropes make the speaker’s intention clearer than if he had used the more conventional word. Metaphors exemplify this. Aristotle declares that they ‘above all things’ give ‘perspicuity’.63 Cicero says they ‘better convey the whole meaning of the matter’.64 For Quintilian, they add ‘to the copiousness of language’ because they augment the number of res.65 This conviction is picked up later. Smith, for example, says that a metaphor ‘enriches our knowledge with two things at

58 59 60

61 64

E.g. Lamy 1986, pp. 203–4; Puttenham 1589, p. 121; Digby 1645, p. 7. Lamy 1986, p. 207. Melanchthon 1521, sig. Ciiir: ‘est autem tropus, verbi, seu sermonis in aliam significationem, a propria muatio’. Vickers (1989, p. 283) explains how elocutio was regarded not as merely ornamental, but as the means of perfect mental expression. Lamy 1986, p. 218. 62 Sherry 1961, p. 13. 63 Aristotle 1926, p. 355. Cicero 1942, ii, p. 125. 65 Quintilian 1920–22, iii, p. 303.

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once, with the truth and a similitude’.66 The multiplying images feed off each other in a productive symbiosis. It is interesting to note here a related rhetorical reason to depart from common use, because, despite Locke’s spitting rage at rhetoric, it is an explanation he copies. Locke suggests that many thoughts are named metaphorically, that is, by giving them existing names whose meanings relate to the as yet unnamed thought.67 This is a view that Peacham espouses (whom we have also seen presage Locke’s ascription of sociable speech to God’s design). Peacham argues that tropical speech is sometimes a matter of ‘necessity’. The multiplicity of experience outstretches language, so it has to double up, as it were, to communicate these anonymous items. The first speakers are taken to have ‘borrowed’ names from things that resemble the undenominated things, ‘that by translation they might utter their minds largely, and set forth any matters with great perspecuity and pleasauntnesse’.68 Sherry repeats that a speaker might, out of ‘necessitie’, have to disobey propriety.69 The orator’s claim to extraordinary perspicuity, due, paradoxically, to both common use and tropicality, attracts vehement repudiation. Just as orators are attacked for verbosity, so are they accused of obscurity. This is partly because everybody wants to appropriate the core values of significance and perspicuity, and to attribute their binary opposites to enemies, all of which they do, often, ironically, by means of eloquent virtuosity.70 However, the argument against elocutio also has some intrinsic merit. Far from being an honest means to semantic illumination, it could instead be impugned for breaching the customary norms of language and thereby jeopardising communication per se, let alone extraordinary elucidation. It flies in the self-consciously open and frank face of the new philosophers who tell it like it is. Boyle articulates this opposition between perspicuity and elocutio. He explains that ‘where our design is only to inform readers, not to delight or persuade them, perspicuity’ should qualify our style rather than rhetorical ornaments, which ‘darken . . . the subject’.71 In his Ecclesiastes (1675), Wilkins’ injunctions for preaching reflect the new plainness. He says that a phrase ‘must be plain and natural, not being darkened with the

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68 Smith, John 1656, p. 10. 67 Locke 1975, pp. 403–4 (iii. i. 5). Peacham 1971, sig. Biv. Sherry 1961, p. 13. 70 Vickers 1985, p. 42 and Vickers 1987, p. 13. Boyle 1661, p. 195. Locke had this edition of The Sceptical Chymist (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 92).

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affectation of scholastical harshness, or rhetorical flourishes’.72 Joseph Glanvill epitomises the latest paradigm, advocating, in contrast to ‘affected Rhetorications’, ‘plain words’ and proclaiming (by means of the quintessentially elocutionary practice of redescription) that ‘plainness is for ever the best eloquence, and ’tis the most forcible’. He confides, somewhat disingenuously, in his audience that ‘there is a bastard kind of eloquence that is crept into the pulpit, which consists in affectations of wit and finery, flourishing, metaphors, and cadencies’.73 sensible words Rhetoricians make exceptionally conspicuous the view that words have to be sensible to represent their absent contents. Their prime objective being to transfer the speaker’s intention to the audience, they attend assiduously to the interface between word and hearer. Theirs is the art of persuasion, which penetrates the auditor’s mind and brings it round to sympathy with the speaker’s cause. They seek the most successful ways of affecting the auditor, and they light on sensation as a pre-eminent means. As Puttenham remarks, the mind is ‘not available unlesse it be by sensible approaches, whereof the audible is of greatest force for instruction or discipline’.74 We have already met the Aristotelian dictum, reinvented by the new empiricists, that the path towards understanding begins in sense perception. In addition to explaining why words work at all, this insight informs the rhetoricians’ more intense exploitation of the sensibility of words. They orchestrate sounds and silences like a musical score, moving the auditor where they will. Rhetoricians make the most of, and thereby advertise, the palpable nature of words. In his Traite´ du sublime (1674), Boileau’s rendition of Longinus, we are exhorted to attend to the sound of our words. ‘For tho’ these sounds of themselves signifie nothing. Yet by the variations of the tones, mutually striking against each other; and by the mixture of their concords they often, as we experience, cause a wonderful transport and rapture of the soul.’75 The ancients had emphasised the importance of selecting the word that ‘sounds best’, as Quintilian puts it.76 The 72

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Wilkins (1675), p. 199. Cf. Jones (1951) on the attack on pulpit eloquence; contrast (Vickers 1985, p. 45) on the rhetorical tactics of the church (and the Royal Society (p. 63)) against nonconformists (and occultists) and the myth of plainness the church created for itself. Glanvill 1703, pp. 12; 25; 23. 74 Puttenham 1589, p. 164. Boileau 1712, p. 78. In 1703 Locke recommends Boileau’s Du sublime for a gentleman’s study (Locke 1997, p. 351). Quintilian 1920–22, i, p. 81.

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ad Herennium dwells long on the most fitting tone of voice. This interest in sound is recorded in onomatopoeia. In his Garden of Eloquence (1577) Peacham defines this trope as ‘when we invent, devise, fayne, and make a name, immitating the sound of that it signifyeth, as hurliburly’.77 It fuses sound and sense into Edenic transparency. There are also figura dictionis, described by Fenner as ‘speache . . . garnished by the pleasant and sweet sound of words joyned together’.78 He focuses on the delightful sonority that warms the auditor to what is said. Walker advocates a pleasurable aural experience. ‘Words smooth and sweeter-sounded . . . are to be used rather then rough and harsh’. He warns against ‘causing an ungratefull sound’, depicting the auditor’s mind as something that needs ingratiating, that might bar or admit.79 Puttenham discusses ‘auricular’ figures that ‘serve th’eare onely’, and can ‘ravish’ it; an example is ‘Aposiopesis’, or ‘the figure of silence’, where the speaker breaks off, communicating either shame, fear, threat or ‘a moderation of anger’.80 Perhaps most desirable are ‘sententious’ figures, which ‘ravish’ the ear as well as the mind. In a virtuoso piece of word-play, Hobbes indicates the sensuous raptures that poetry should induce. Bemoaning tired and hackneyed ‘metaphors and similitudes’, he explains that: the Phrases of Poesy, as the ayres of musique with often hearing become insipide, the reader having no more sense of their force, then our flesh is sensible of the bones that susteine it. As the sense we have of bodies, consisteth in change and variety of impression, so also does the sense of language in the variety and changeable use of words.81

Exploiting the ambiguity of ‘sense’ which, in a verbal context, indicates both meaning and sound, Hobbes insists that words, as well as meanings, should be physically sensible. The importance of a full sensory rhetorical experience is revealed by the comparisons of oratory with tasty food, sweet smells, colours, flowers, spectacles, as well as rousing music. Cicero says that a speech should be dressed or ornamented with ‘colour and flavour’ and must neither satiate nor disgust.82 Lamy claims that we are more keenly moved by sense perception than intellectual conception. In his discussion of proper word order, he explains that the ‘ears do instruct us so sensibly what rules are to be observed’. They pick up faults in sentential structure that our mind

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Peacham 1971, sig. Ciiiir. 78 Fenner 1584, sig. D3r. 79 Walker 1682, pp. 25; 24. Puttenham 1589, pp. 133; 139; 164. 81 Hobbes 1971b, p. 53. 82 Cicero 1942, ii, pp. 77–9.

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misses. This is because ‘we are more disturbed at a thing ungrateful to our sense, than to our reason’.83 Glanvill’s scorn and suspicion about aural experience provides an important coda to this section. He rejects the sonorous barrage that language can muster, accusing it of concealing ignorance. He describes the captivated congregation who, on hearing ‘phantastical phrases’, ‘are pleased with their sound’ but, like the preacher, have no idea what the words mean.84 Rhetoricians expose both the sensibility of words and the importance of sense perception in cognition, and thereby cause philosophers to worry about the palpable and seductive nature of words in their own meaningless right. sensible ideas The premium on sensation, in conjunction with the rhetoricians’ desire for perfect communication, exposes broader contemporary anxieties about the elusiveness and insensibility of meaning. Rhetoric demonstrates the gulf that separates words and their absent meanings, as well as the bridge over it. While sensible words transfix the auditor, alone they are but sounds, signifying nothing. The orator must make the concepts that are carried on the backs of words compelling. Ordinarily they are a light cargo. They need weight in order to gain them long and deep admittance to the auditor’s mind. The orator therefore turns again to the senses. The great influence accorded to sense perception is mobilised to give life and affect to concepts themselves, and thereby enhance communication. Commentators on biblical rhetoric stress the necessity of making verbal content sensible, if it is to win minds. In The Interest of Reason in Religion, with the Import & Use of Scripture-Metaphors (1675), the Independent Robert Ferguson explains how ‘the clearest and most convincing Reasons’ are powerless without linguistic ‘attire & apparel’ which will bring them ‘as neer as may be to [the hearers’] sense’ and ‘impress and strike their imagination’.85 Lamy explains that Scripture abounds with ‘metaphors taken from sensible things’ because the weak, fallen mind struggles to understand insensible abstractions, whereas it welcomes ‘easie’, ‘sensible and pleasant’ comparisons.86 83 85

86

Lamy 1986, p. 209. 84 Glanvill 1703, p. 27. Ferguson 1675, p. 361. Although Locke did not own this text, he possessed six pieces by the author (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 134). Lamy 1986, p. 222.

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A passage to meaning is erected via the theory of representation, whereby an absent thing is made present. According to Quintilian, this can be done by picturing the thing with linguistic imagery, as well as portraiture and sculpture. The technical term for the quality that makes res present is "
”
fi
 "¶fi, which Quintilian translates as evidentia. He says that it should be wielded ‘when a truth requires not merely to be told, but to some extent obtruded’.87 ‘Enargeia, evidence or perspicuitie’, says Sherry, ‘is when a thynge is so described that it semeth to the reader or hearer that he beholdeth it as it were in doyng’.88 The orator is urged to personify abstract concepts, to pour blood into the veins of his characters. Homer was the master of making inanimate things animate, and provided a model for early-modern writers.89 Walker explains how ‘grief’ can be made plain by talking instead about ‘tears’.90 Peacham celebrates the fact that by the use of figures, the orator ‘may set forth any matter with a goodly perspicuitie, and paynt out any person, deede, or thing, so cunninglye with these couloures, that it shall seeme rather a lyvely image paynted in tables, then a reporte expressed with a tongue’.91 The preferred way of bringing the matter to life is by appealing to the queen of the senses: sight. Cicero declares that while all metaphors that appeal directly to the senses are effective, the best appeal to sight – the ‘keenest’ sense.92 According to Aristotle, the most perspicuous speech ‘sets things before the eyes’.93 Horace reiterates the desire to make meaning visible, summing it up with the tag ‘ut pictura poesis’ which guides subsequent writers.94 The aim is to turn remote auditors into captivated spectators.95 The ad Herennium states that a metaphor ‘is used for the sake of creating a vivid mental picture (rei ante oculos)’.96 One truly communicates by placing, as Melanchthon puts it, ‘the sentiment of [one’s] mind in front of the others’ eyes’.97 The Art of Rhetorick, as to Elocutio explains that metaphors ‘are to be so perspicuous, that the similitude may appear as plain as the sun’.98 Walker repeats the point. ‘Metaphors . . . are similitudes contracted to a word; whereby we endeavour, not so much to render our conceits intelligible to the auditors reason, as to paint them visible to his sense. For things of sense onely illustrate; and amongst them, those of sight, most.’99 Boileau defines the 87 88 91 94 96 98

Quintilian 1920–22, iii, p. 245; ii, p. 85. See Rigolot 1999. Sherry 1961, p. 66. 89 Aristotle 1926, p. 407. 90 Walker 1682, p. 25. Peacham 1971, sig. Aiiir. 92 Cicero 1942, ii, p. 127. 93 Aristotle 1926, p. 405. Braider 1999. 95 See Skinner (1996, pp. 182–8) on turning auditors into spectators. Rhetorica ad Herennium 1954, p. 343. 97 Melanchthon 1999, p. 63. The Art of Rhetorick 1706, p. 2. 99 Walker 1682, p. 55.

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use of ‘images’, ‘pictures or fictions’, as ‘to paint things, and give the reader a clear view of them’.100 Hobbes simply says that ‘a poet is a painter’.101 The Art of Rhetorick describes the figure of hypotyposis ‘whereby we express a matter so particularly, that it seems to be represented to the very eye . . . where the whole image . . . is as it were painted out in words’.102 The author calls this figure ‘the very consummation of all rhetorick’. Evoking the full-bodied sensuous emotional experience that the orator should effect, Sherry says of a good metaphor that ‘none perswadeth more effecteouslye, none sheweth the thyng before oure eyes more evidently, none moveth more mightily the affeccions, none maketh the oracion more goodlye, pleasaunt, nor copious’.103 elocutio – breaking the contract While the devices of elocutio are intended to clarify and beguile, they also, as I have already begun to explain, publicise the ease with which the semantic contract – those conventions that attach words to meanings and the only proper source of verbal meaning – can be broken. Tropes are, according to Smith, ‘words . . . used for elegancy in a changed signification; or when a word is drawn from its proper and genuine signification to another’.104 Peacham’s definition highlights the impropriety of tropes: ‘an alteration of a worde or sentence, from the proper and natural signification, to another not proper, but yet nye and likely’.105 Puttenham throws into relief the inherent deviousness of tropical speech, calling ‘Metonimia’, ‘the Misnamer’, and ‘Onomatopeia’, the ‘New namer’.106 Metaphor is queen of the tropes. Its specific definition is almost interchangeable with that of its genus. Wilson describes it as ‘an alteration of a worde, from the proper and naturalle meaning, to that whiche is not proper, and yet agreeth there unto, by some lykenes that appeareth to be in it’.107 As Ferguson puts it, ‘in metaphors one thing is put for another’.108 And as Hobbes says, metaphors ‘openly professe deceipt’.109 The duplicitous potential in language is grossly magnified in another trope, catachresis – usually translated as ‘abuse’. Puttenham describes it as a ‘plaine abuse’.110 Hoskins says that this trope ‘is somewhat more 100 103 104

105 108

Boileau 1712, p. 40. 101 Hobbes 1844, p. vi. 102 The Art of Rhetorick 1706, pp. 51–2; 52. Sherry 1961, p. 40. Smith, John 1656, p. 2. Kinney (1986, p. 18) argues that sixteenth-century English humanists presented language as ‘manipulable . . . relative, the act of formulating it creative’. Peacham 1971, sig. Biv. 106 Puttenham 1589, pp. 150; 151. 107 Wilson 1560, fo. 88r. Ferguson 1675, p. 305. 109 Hobbes 1996, p. 52. 110 Puttenham 1589, p. 150.

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desperate than a metaphor. It is the expressing of one matter by the name of another which is incompatible with it, and sometimes clean contrary’.111 In his Arts of Rhetorick (1634) John Barton writes of this ‘abuse’ that it is ‘very farre fetcht’, ‘an unusuall, strange, and streined metaphor, not obvious and congruous’.112 Melanchthon’s example is calling someone who has killed his friend a ‘patricide’.113 Yet another trope that wears its hypocrisy on its sleeve is irony, that is, ‘when your words differ from your thoughts’.114 Smith says that the use of this trope is ‘to dissemble in speaking . . . as if we should say black is white. It is called the mocking trope, whereby in derision we speak contrary to what we think or mean’.115 The Art of Rhetorick calls it ‘a dissembling trope’.116 Rhetoricians are not only unembarrassed by, but positively applaud, these manifestations of linguistic impropriety – an approach which seems to some to be, by definition, indecorous. Shaw provides a burlesque account of Trope’s enthusiasm for his own misdemeanours.117 Puttenham happily outlines the ‘the darknesse and duplicitie of his [synechdoche’s] sence’. He evokes the unselfconscious delight with which the rhetorical tradition wallows in its linguistic transgressions. Figures are ‘in a sorte abuses or rather trepasses in speech, because they passe the ordinary limits of common utterance, and be occupied of purpose to deceive the eare and also the minde, drawing it from plainnesse and simplicitie to a certaine doubleness, whereby our talke is the more guileful & abusing’.118 If words are only connected to meanings by the semantic contract, breaking that contract renders language strictly unintelligible. As Lamy explains, while we might ‘call a Horse a Dog’, we cannot ‘take the one for the other, without an intire confusion to the conversation of mankind’.119 The fragility of the semantic contract leads not only to the bounded problem of improper speech, but also to unbounded semantic proliferation and readerly authority. Rather than obediently switching between fixed meanings, a dislocated word is autonomous. It can flit anywhere. Or rather, once it leaves the speaker’s mouth, it becomes the property of hearers. Relying on them for its application, its meaning can multiply accordingly.120 The auditor’s freedom is exposed in discussions of tropical speech. Hoskins explains how the mind naturally roams Hoskins 1935, p. 11. 112 Barton 1634, sig. C1r [p. 19]; sig. C2r [p. 21]. Melanchthon 1521, sig. Civr. 114 Cicero 1942, I, p. 403. 115 Smith, John 1656, p. 45. 116 The Art of Rhetorick 1706, p. 9. 117 Shaw 1972, p. 114. 118 Puttenham 1589, pp. 163; 128. 119 Lamy 1986, p. 203. 120 Cf. Cave (1979) on the worry about linguistic proliferation in the Renaissance. 111

113

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beyond its intended object, ‘like the eye, that cannot choose but view the whole knot when it beholds but one flower in a garden of purpose’.121 In his Academy of Eloquence (1654) Blount paints a rich picture of auditory action when he elucidates the figure of ‘Intimation’. It ‘leaves the collection of greatness to our understanding, but expressing some mark of it. It exceeds speech in silence, and makes our meaning more intelligible by a touch, then by direct treating . . . it doth not directly aggravate, but by consequence or proportion, intimate more to your minde, then to your ears’.122 Walker says that metaphors are most ‘significant’ when they originate from familiar things which the hearer immediately understands ‘and applies them farther than the speaker’.123 The view that the hearer might roam mentally beyond the knowledge and intention of the speaker vexes the conditions of communication.124 Elocutionary biblical exegesis exemplifies the reader’s monopoly of meaning. Swynnerton mocks the way in which exegetes decide to read the text literally or not, simply as it suits them. ‘When it lyketh them, the lettre kylleth, the Scripture is figurate . . . When it lyketh them, then the lettre kylleth not, then the Scripture is not figurate.’125 He promises to settle matters by ruling ‘when the lettre kylleth’, which he does in a way that bears the mark of the Protestant reformation. Much later, when the government of England was thoroughly converted, Robert Ferguson defends the non-conformists’ tropical reading of Scripture against Anglican attack. He takes it as his duty to decode the word of God for ‘the defence and vindication of the doctrines of the Gospel; many of which are undermined under the pretence of renouncing luscious and fulsome metaphors’.126 ‘The Bible’, he claims, ‘is replenished and adorned with all sort of figurative expressions’ that he intends to resolve.127 He lays down the ‘rule’ that ‘we impose not a proper sense where the words ought to be taken in a Tropical’.128 He decides the divine ‘intention’.129 Meaning is delivered into the hands of a self-appointed ‘Judicious Interpreter’.130 Needless to say, interpreters abound and with wildly divergent results. Barton, Caussin, 121 122

123 124

125 128

Hoskins 1935, p. 8. Blount 1971, pp. 20–1. Locke owned and extensively annotated Blount’s Censura Celebriorum Authorum (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 88). Walker 1682, p. 55 (my emphasis). See Vickers (1999, pp. 10 and 53) on the integral inclusion of the reader/hearer in the rhetorician’s sights. Kahn (1985) argues that rhetoric was definitively concerned with reader response (p. 19) and explores how various renaissance authors harnessed the ‘active conception of reading’ to educate the reader. Cf. Davidson (1965) on the centrality of the audience in seventeenth-century French literature. Swynnerton 1999, p. 99. 126 Ferguson 1675, p. 279. 127 Ferguson 1675, p. 281. Ferguson 1675, p. 328. 129 Ferguson 1675, p. 331. 130 Ferguson 1675, p. 345.

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Fenner, Ferguson, Smith and Wilkins, to name but a few, are some such self-made hermeneuts. Wilkins sets himself up as a ‘rational’ expositor, thereby authenticating himself, in a nice piece of self-description.131 Maintaining that ‘private interpretation’ must not be admitted to the interpretative enterprise, he proceeds, all the same, to divide Scripture into ‘manifest, or cryptical’ parts that need identification and exposition.132 Smith explains that ‘the holy Scripture is not barren of, but abounds with tropes and figures of all sorts’, and needs ‘the Spirit of the Lord’, as well as the rules of rhetoric, for its true disclosure.133 He exemplifies his point with a little sentence which had lacerated the Christian church. ‘This is my body’ is to be understood ‘spiritually’, as opposed to ‘literally’, of course. speak in g tru th, or winning belief u nder the cover of words The intrinsic duplicity of the tropes might be considered characteristic of rhetoric as a whole, and, in turn, of language in general. According to Montaigne, rhetoricians practice the ‘art of lying and deception’. They ‘pride themselves on deceiving not our eyes but our judgement, bastardising and corrupting things in their very essence’.134 Rhetoricians, for their part, protest too much in denying the charge. The grand, sometimes desperate claim is that the true orator is necessarily a wise and good citizen. Quintilian is the most convinced exponent of this view: ‘No man can speak well who is not good himself .’135 Cicero asserts that ‘it is from knowledge that oratory must derive its beauty and fullness’.136 Eloquence must be wise to deserve the name. However, they are led to admit that it is in fact an art that can be used to good or evil, true or false, ends. And so rhetoric begins its long slide from its bright beginning. Quintilian says that like all great things – the medical profession, a sword, the sun – oratory can harm, but this does not impugn its virtuous status.137 In De elegantiae linguae Latinae (1471) Valla says that it is in the nature of arts 131

132 135

136 137

Wilkins 1675, sig. A5r. Cf. Hoopes (1962) and Mulligan (1984) on ‘right reason’ in religion; Smith (1989) on the special access that radical English sects claimed they had to the spirit of the word; Mandelbrote ((1994)) on biblical criticism at the end of the century; Young (1998, p. 1) on the pathway to ‘reasoning to excess’ at the end of the eighteenth century and Locke’s central place in the incarnation of this ‘knowing age’. 133 Wilkins 1675, p. 15. Smith, John 1656, sig. A5r; sig. A5v. 134 Montaigne 1991, p. 341. Quintilian 1920–22, i, p. 315. See Struever (1993) on the healing, curative characterisation of rhetoric. Cicero 1942, i, p. 17. Cf. Gray (1963) on the ideal harmony between wisdom and style. Quintilian 1920–22, i, p. 321.

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that ‘you can use them for good or evil’, and that it would be ridiculous to condemn them on this ground.138 However, the inevitable consequence of this concession is that rhetoric’s essence cannot lie in its commitment to truth or goodness, but in its capacity to persuade. Quintilian’s faltering claim that rhetoric ‘is realised in action, not in the result obtained’ seems to be thrown out of court.139 It is in its winning guise that we meet rhetoric in the early-modern period. Students learn it by arguing in utramque partem, that is, on both sides of the question.140 Aristotle, intimating a form of discursive ethics, is a great proponent of the view that a dialectical struggle is the best way of getting at the truth: The orator should be able to prove opposites, as in logical arguments; not that we should do both (for one ought not to persuade people to do what is wrong), but that the real state of the case may not escape us, and that we ourselves may be able to counteract false arguments, if another makes an unfair use of them . . . that which is true and better is naturally always easier to prove and more likely to persuade.141

Lamy echoes Aristotle’s optimism, arguing that the initial ‘love’ inspired by ‘a deceitful Orator’ soon turns to ‘hatred’ as the audience realises the cheat.142 However, the anti-Aristotelian claim that it is not the fact of the matter, but the virtuosity of the speaker that persuades, proves more compelling in the literature. At the beginning of Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates proposes that rhetoric is concerned with the amoral manufacture of opinion as opposed to knowledge. ‘Rhetoric, it seems, is a producer of persuasion for belief, not for instruction in the matter of right and wrong.’143 In his Index rhetoricus (1625) Farnaby defines the end of rhetoric as ‘to persuade’.144 Hobbes (?) polemically mistranslates Aristotle’s original definition of rhetoric as ‘that Faculty, by which wee understand what will serve our turne, concerning any subject, to winne beliefe in the hearer’.145 We are reminded of that crack in the linguistic mirror occasioned by the practice of dialectical disputation. A culture that 138

139

140

141

142 145

Valla 1522, p. 313: ‘Quibus et bene uti posis et male’. Locke owned this text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 256). Quintilian 1920–22, i, p. 337. Cf. Monfasani (1992) on the anti-Quintilian claim that the orator is not necessarily a vir bonus. See Coote (1665) for an example of a debate. Cf. Ong (1971) on the ‘ritual male combat centred on disputation’ (p. 17), and on the ‘tyranny’ of oration (p. 53). Aristotle 1926, pp. 11–13. Cf. Grassi (1980) on the supposed tension between rhetoric and philosophy; Vickers (1982b) on this territorial dispute; Vickers (1983) on the power of the orator; Trinkaus (1983) on humanism and truth. Lamy 1986, p. 366. 143 Plato 1925, p. 287. 144 Farnaby 1970, p. 1 (working back from p. 9). Hobbes 1986, p. 40.

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positively encourages arguing pro and con and that values victory above all else, not only dissolves faith in goodness and truth, but also exposes how language can be detached from goodness and truth, and still win the day. A good orator is irresistible. This is because he plays with his words on his audience’s passions. And, as Aristotle admits, it is passion that moves the mind. ‘The emotions are all those affections which cause men to change their opinion in regard to their judgements, and are accompanied by pleasure and pain.’146 Early-modern philosophers fervently and increasingly agree that passion informs cognition,147 and it is this agreement that turns Aristotle’s Rhetoric – a manual on the emotions and therefore the key to an audience’s favour – into such an important book for rhetoricians and philosophers alike. Caussin declares that eloquence ‘can effectively seize and bind people’s spirits’. In his De inventione dialectica (1515) Agricola writes of the power by which ‘we either make faith in one who believes in us and lead him to follow us as if freely, or we completely conquer one who does not believe and drag him fighting against us’.148 Boileau also refers to the rhetorician’s power of bending people’s wills. The ‘sublime’ is ‘something extraordinary and marvellous that strikes us in a Discourse and makes it elevate, ravish and transport us’.149 It has an ‘invincible force’. Resistance is futile. Wilson makes the point that eloquence can change our hearts and minds. ‘Soche force hathe the tongue and soche is the power of eloquence and reason, that most men are forced even to yelde in that, whiche most standeth againste their will.’150 This characterisation is generally represented through metaphors of arms and battle. When Sarcasm, or barbed irony, enters the stage in Shaw’s Words Made Visible, Pronounciation says to him, ‘you are an arm’d Figure, which is a thing strange to see. I thought my brothers [Elocution] captains had conquer’d only by words.’ Sarcasm replies, ‘So do I, Sir, but they are very sharp ones.’151 Rhetoric is of such unconquerable but indifferent strength that to teach it to vicious men would be, as Cicero says, to ‘put weapons into the hands of madmen’.152 The classic example of such a disaster is Catiline, the 146 147

148

149 152

Aristotle 1926, p. 173. On the different ways in which this is thought to be the case and on the overarching move away from a conflictual to a determinist model of desire, see James 1997. Caussin 1630, p. 5: ‘efficax capiendis illigandisque animis’. Agricola 1538, p. 12: ‘Fidem facimus, vel credeti, et velut spote sequetem ducimus: vel pervincimus non credentem, atque repugnantem trahimus’. See Vickers (1982a) on the practicalities of rhetoric and the increasing importance of moving the passions. Boileau 1712, p. 7. 150 Wilson 1560, fo. Aviir. 151 Shaw 1972, p. 172. Cicero 1942, i, p. 45.

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eloquent revolutionary. Thomas Blount recalls that ‘Pericles (the orator) was no less a tyrant in Athens then Pysistratus’, and that Cyneas’ metaphorical arms proved more effective than the literal ‘sword of Pyrrhus’.153 In his De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum (1531), Agrippa rails against the pernicious power of rhetoric that is so often employed in the service of sedition. ‘For nothing is more dangerous to civic offices than this art, from which descend prevaricators, dodgers, perverters of law, sycophants’, who ‘usurp a certain kind of tyranny over the innocent’.154 Many rhetoricians defend the invincible quality of eloquence on the grounds that it alone can lead the foolish and passionate herd to righteousness. Its crippling yoke is justified by a means–ends argument.155 Even Aristotle, who would rather ‘fight the case with facts alone’, sadly admits that enchanting style and delivery have to be employed sometimes ‘owing to the corruption of the hearer’.156 Quintilian reiterates the claim that the power of rhetoric is needed to persuade corrupt ears. ‘If, as is the case, our hearers are fickle of mind, and truth is exposed to a host of perils, we must call in art to aid us in the fight and employ such means as will help our cause.’ Unenlightened judges ‘have to be tricked to prevent them falling into error’. If they were philosophers, ‘there [would] be very little scope for eloquence whose value will lie almost entirely in its power to charm’.157 Although Ramus is disparaging about his refigured rhetoric, he admits its instrumental role with an unsympathetic audience. ‘All the tropes and figures of style and all the graces of delivery, which constitute the entirety of true rhetoric . . . serve no other purpose than to lead the troublesome and stubborn auditor’.158 Caussin defines the art as establishing ‘a kind tyranny in the hearts of men’.159 It is by language that the orator exerts such a bewitching sovereignty over his audience. Rhetoric reveals two terrific virtues of language: it is possible to say anything, and saying it makes it so. As Invention says of Pronunciation in Shaw’s play, ‘It’s dangerous disputing with a person that can call a man out of his name, and yet make that to be his name whatsoever he calls him.’160 It is in the nature of language – which relies on sensible words to express insensible ideas – that the auditor cannot 153 154

155 156 159 160

Blount 1971, sig. A3v. Agrippa 1568, p. 45: ‘Nam hoc artificio nihil periculosius civilis officiis, ab hoc praevaricatores, tergiversatores, calumniatores, sycophante . . . ac in innocentes tyrannidem quanda sibi usurpant’. Locke had this edition (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 69). Howell (1961, p. 3) stresses the rhetoricians’ popular audience. Aristotle 1926, p. 347. 157 Quintilian 1920–22, i, pp. 339; 337. 158 Ramus 2000, p. 159. Caussin 1630, p. 459: ‘mitem . . . tyrannidem in pectoris hominum constituit’. Shaw 1972, p. 105.

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penetrate the linguistic front. He is completely at the mercy of the way the orator chooses to represent things. Language’s extraordinary power lies in its conjunction of seeming enlightenment and real opacity. The orator’s tool seems to be like a window, but it is really a picture. The audience thinks they are looking through the words to the truth, but in fact they are viewing what the speaker has painted with his words, and are impotent to do anything else.161 Rhetoric exposes the especially creative potency of opaque language in the context of the moral world. It offers a number of techniques that (mis) describe this worryingly pliable sphere, threatening to efface any intrinsic qualities it might have. Shaw dramatises the constitutive consequences of naming at pleasure. Trope’s son Metonymy rejoices in his own fixed name: ‘when all the rest of the world have no name, but what I please to give them, is (as the imposition of names has always been accounted) no small argument of my authority. I am the great Nomenclator of the world’.162 One very potent device is amplification, which ‘increases’ or ‘decreases’ matters through redescription. Paradiastole is a species of amplification. It transforms the moral complexion of something or someone in accordance with the orator’s design, usually turning vice into virtue. This is based on Aristotle’s location of virtue on the golden mean between two vices.163 He advises speakers to use paradiastole in the genus demonstrativum, that form of oratory that praises or blames. ‘In each case we must adopt a term from qualities closely connected, always in the more favorable sense; for instance . . . the recklessly extravagant as liberal’.164 Quintilian exhorts the 161

162 163

164

See Blount (1971, sigs. A2v–A3v) on the indispensability and visibility of speech; Hoskins (1935, p. 2) on the mutual dependence of res and verba. Cf. Cicero (1942, ii, p. 113) on the redundancy of wisdom without eloquence. See also Cave (1979) on devious language; Krajewski (1992) on Hermes’ tainted reputation. There seems to be a tension between the claims that a deceiver can communicate unproblematically, and the view that in order to communicate the speaker has to have thoughts corresponding to those he articulates. See, for example, Lamy 1986, p. 305: ‘A Good Imagination contributes particularly to the clearness and facility of Discourse . . . A Man whose Imagination is easy, represents to himself whatever he is to say: He sees clearly before the eyes of his mind; so that expressing by his words, the things as present to him, his Discourse is clear, and the things do range and take their places of themselves in his Discourse’; Felton 1971, p. 106: ‘if a man hath not a clear perception of the matters he undertaketh to treat of be his style never so plain as to the words he useth, it never can be clear’. An answer to this conundrum might lie in the fact either that the orator must be persuaded of what he is saying or that while vivid thought is necessary for exceptionally expressive speech, this is not the case for ordinary communication. Shaw 1972, p. 114. Aristotle 1980, p. 39. Locke owned the Ethicorum nicomachiorum (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 75). See Skinner (1994) on moral ambiguity in Renaissance eloquence; Skinner (1996, pp. 133– 80) on rhetorical redescription and its dangers. See also Struever (1983) on the humanists’ contextualist constitution of virtue and vice. Aristotle 1926, p. 98.

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orator to use the same strategy of linguistic metamorphosis. He explains that ‘if the question turns on the nature of the act’, then ‘we must restate’ that act ‘in a different way, alleging other motives and another purpose and putting a different complexion on the case’. We must resort to the constitutive power of language, whereby a thing becomes what it is named. ‘Some imputations we must mitigate by the use of other words, luxury will be softened down into generosity, avarice into economy, carelessness into simplicity.’165 Cicero chimes in: ‘on a charge of corrupt practices, lavish generosity, can seldom be distinguished from profuse bribery’.166 This device is embraced by early-modern rhetoricians. Peacham explains that it enables us to ‘excuse our own vices, or other mens whom we doe defend, by calling them vertues, as when we call him that is craftye, wyse’.167 The Art of Rhetorick says that paradiastole ‘proves a thing by its way of interpretation, or shewing the contrary’.168 Puttenham writes that by its means ‘we make the best of a bad thing’.169 Hoskins asks with breath-taking candour, ‘how can you commend a thing more acceptably to our attention than by telling us it is extraordinary’?170 The opposite is meiosis, by its which ‘you diminish and abbase a thing’.171 With a shamelessness that verges on the comic, Sherry explains that ‘increasyng or diminishing’ is achieved ‘by chaungynge the worde of the thynge, when in encreasynge we use a more cruell worde, and a softer in diminishynge, as when we call an evyll man a thiefe, and saye he hath kylled us, when he hath beaten us’.172 Language emerges as a creative as opposed to a servile instrument. It forges the moral world, not the other way round. Its force is further amplified because its hearers are often under the illusion that it describes things as they are, not as its user wants them to be. The uncertainty of definitions is another resource that rhetoricians mine in order to bend the truth to their will. This is a locus communis visited by rhetoricians for their artificial proofs ‘when the name by which an act should be called is in controversy’.173 Quintilian explains that ‘though there may be no doubt as to a term, there is a question as to what it includes’. He gives the following cases: ‘to use bad language to one’s wife does not amount to cruelty’; ‘whether a man caught in a brothel with another man’s wife is adultery’.174 By exploiting the fluidity of verbal meaning, the orator softens or hardens his blows. Again, then, semantic indeterminacy is flagged suggestively by rhetoricians. 165 167 170 173

Quintilian 1920–1922, ii, pp. 91; 91–2. 166 Cicero 1942, i, p. 275. Peacham 1971, sig. Niiiiv. 168 The Art of Rhetorick 1706, p. 44. 169 Puttenham 1589, p. 154. Hoskins 1935, p. 17. 171 Puttenham 1589, p. 154. 172 Sherry 1961, p. 70. Rhetorica ad Herennium 1954, p. 39. 174 Quintilian 1920–22, iii, pp. 85; 87.

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Rhetoric broadcasts the free-floating nature of language, the way in which it can be applied as the speaker wills, not as the object dictates. Although Bacon pleads that rhetoric only adorns goodness, evil being immune to fine colours, at another point he admits that it ‘paint[s] and disguise[s] the true appearance of things’. Indeed, he composes an entire work, Of the Colours of Good and Evil, where he prescribes linguistic devices which have the ‘power to alter the nature of the subject in appearance’.175 Rhetoric also demonstrates the invisibility and invincibility of linguistic perfidy, occasioned by the irrevocably opaque fac¸ade of language. It enables things, in Pufendorf’s words, to be ‘painted with a quite different face from what they truly bear’.176 And sometimes, pushes Hobbes, the speakers themselves are taken in. ‘Eloquence’, he writes, ‘seemeth wisedome, both to themselves and others’.177 We learn the ‘truth’ about things according to the denominations given them. We are subject to the sovereignty of this ‘beautiful deceit’, as Sprat calls rhetoric – ‘a thing fatal to peace and good manners’.178 175 177

Bacon 1996b, pp. 238; 218; 1996a, p. 97. 176 Pufendorf 1703, vii, p. 143. Hobbes 1996, p. 72. 178 Sprat 1959, pp. 112; 111.

part i1

Philosophical developments of the problem of language

chapter 4

The relationships between language, mind and word

The mirror that language held up to the world, which we met in logic, was in some ways shattered during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As the regiments of the ‘scientific revolution’1 laid siege to the forms and species of Aristotelian ontology, the old words and classifications no longer fitted the new world that was being discovered. Moreover, with the reinvention of ancient scepticism and with epistemological transformations more broadly, human experience, which had seemed to deliver the world to men, came to be doubted as a reliable conduit. As the unity of subject and object was threatened, so too was the derivative unity between word and object. Appearance divided from reality and took language with it. However, this did not necessarily mean that a veil of ideas was draped before us or that language fell away from reality.2 Resounding warnings 1

2

Shapin (1996) begins his book on the subject with a sentence that brilliantly captures the problems but also the viability of the phrase: ‘there was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it’ (p. 1). Dear (1988, p. 1) defends the use of this phrase and the changes it describes. While Sorell (1993a) argues for a revision of the old story that modern science superseded Aristotelian science (p. 1), he maintains that one ought to favour ‘a Schmittian tolerance’ of it. See Schmitt (1973) on the continuity and diversity of Aristotelianism. Rogers (2000) defends a characterisation of both ‘new’ science and epistemology. Tuck (1998, p. 19) emphasises that to study philosophy in the European universities for most of the seventeenth century was to study to the works of Aristotle. See also Dear 2001, Hunter 1989 and, for the relation of the new science to society, Hunter 1981. See Ayers 1998b. For alternative and opposing views, see Rorty (1980, p. 139) on the ‘veil-of-ideas’, Yolton (1984 and 1987) on direct realism, and Yolton (1990) for his attack on Rorty. See also Rogers (2000), who traces a story from realist science to the way of ideas with its ‘epistemic gap between the knower and the known’ (p. 58) which threatens realism; Schmaltz (2002), who argues that the cogito does not begin a path to Kant; McRae (1965) on ‘ideas’. For a balanced and cautionary word about the extent to which ‘modern epistemology’ was ‘conceived in a crise Pyrrhonienne’, see Ayers 1998a, p. 1008. On the rediscovery of and responses to ancient scepticism see Burke 2002, pp. 197–212; Floridi 2002; Larmore 1998; Levi 2000; Popkin 1979 and Popkin 1993; Schmitt 1983; Spolsky 2001; Tuck 1993. On the relationship between language and scepticism see Marcondes 1998; and Southgate 1995 (in Blackloist thought).

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were raised about the dangers of error and dogma, and many philosophers, particularly those who set great store by the senses, did see a large fraction of our thoughts and words reflect more on the human subject than on the objective world. But they were not idealists. The vast majority made tentative – or not so tentative – claims about how the mind, and therefore language, could capture the world. And far from being preoccupied with Pyrrhonian incredulity, many, if they engaged with it at all, used it as a foil, and confidently set about describing the world. Sometimes in relation to these issues, several commentators who have specifically addressed language in the early-modern period assert that there were two rival and incompatible theories: a nomenclature of things versus an expression of thought. Some commentators pit the two contemporaneously against each other in a battle between ‘empiricists’ and ‘rationalists’.3 Others see a dominant language of things, championed by the new scientists and ultimately usurped by the language of thought under the decisive captaincy of Locke.4 This chapter seeks to demonstrate the pervasive inclusion of both thoughts and things in early-modern theories of language, whilst exploring the differences, developments and doubts therein. the ancient marriage between word and essence Let us remind ourselves of the foundation of early-modern philosophy of language: the triad of word–concept–thing laid down by Aristotle. Words are symbols of ‘mental affections’, which are themselves ‘representations, or likenesses, images, copies’ of ‘objects’.5 In his Philosophical Essay for the Reunion of Languages (1675), Pierre Besnier writes uncontroversially that words are ‘the expressions of our thoughts, and our thoughts the 3

4

5

Padley (1985 and 1988, I) schematically pits an empiricist conception of language against a rationalist one. Cf. Lennon (1993b), who argues that seventeenth-century philosophy was dominated by a battle between the Cartesian, idealist, gods and Gassendist, materialist, giants, and that Locke should be read primarily as a contributor to the latter cause. In a quite different way, Ayers (1997, p. 4) locates Locke on the side of the empiricist giants. See Atherton (1999) on ‘the empiricists’ (Locke, Berkeley, Hume). See also Ayers (1998a, pp. 1003–8 and pp. 1028–30, and Ayers (1998c, p. 24) for a restrained and persuasive defence of the rationalist/empiricist distinction. Formigari 1993, p. 13: ‘the way of ideas thus severs the univocal correspondence between language and realia . . . language is no more conceived as a repertory of real definitions, a nomenclature of created objects . . . it is seen as a body of historical and cultural choices in which empirical and contingent factors play a decisive role’. Cohen (1977) traces a shift from language as a reflection of nature to a reflection of the mind, in which Locke ‘reidentified’ words as ideas not things (p. xxiv). Cf. Padley (1985 and 1988, i, p. 352) on Locke’s novel enclosure of language in its own autonomous arena. Aristotle 1938b, p. 115. Cf. Ebbesen 1981, pp. 141–3.

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representations of objects’.6 However, just like the logicians, who carelessly confuse concept and thing, slipping one underneath the other, effecting an invisible move between language and the world, Besnier settles into the binary division. Using a common image of the duality, he explains that the ‘signification’ is ‘the soul of the word, as the sound is its body’.7 In his dictionary, the New World of English Words (1658), Edward Phillips voices the dualist mentalite´: ‘all learning in general, is chiefly reducible into those two grand heads, Words and Things’.8 In addition to these sleights of hand is the suggestion, implanted by the Terminists, that words might stand directly for things. Fostered by a thorough logical training, then, this twosome blooms (in)advertently in philosophy more generally, albeit interspersed with circumspect observations about interpretative, mental mediation. Aristotle himself is far from cavalier about the developmental role of the mind in linguistic reference. In Posterior Analytics he points out the gulf between nature, which is essentially constituted by universals, and our initial sense-perception of particulars. That which is ‘more knowable’ to us is less known to nature.9 However, in the process of ‘experience’, or many persisting sense-perceptions, the soul can bridge the gulf and thereby ‘establish’ ‘the universal’, such as ‘man’, as opposed to Callias, Plato or Socrates. The mind cognises ‘the One that corresponds to the Many, the unity that is present in them all’.10 It is of these universals, whose apprehension is necessary to reasoning, that the philosopher speaks. Aristotle’s is an ambitious account of the mind’s capacity to know (and name) the essences of things – or ‘substances’, as they are more properly (and later, provocatively) called. Substances are totalities of matter and ‘form’ (the essence of a substance, such as rational animal in the case of man). According to Aristotle, the mind becomes identical with these forms, so that ‘in a sense’, he announces, ‘the soul is all the existing universe’.11 He compares sensation – ‘the reception of the form of sensible objects without the matter’ – to the way that ‘wax receives the impression of the signet-ring without the iron or the gold’.12 Language can gorge on 6 9 11

12

Besnier 1971, p. 51. 7 Besnier 1971, p. 50. 8 Phillips 1969, sig. b3r. Aristotle 1960, pp. 31–3. 10 Aristotle 1960, p. 259. Aristotle 1935, pp. 179–81. Cf. Lear (1988, p. 229) on Aristotle: ‘the order of reality and the order of one’s knowledge of reality would be one and the same’; and pp. 116–35 for a wonderful account of the identity of subject and object in Aristotle. See Park (1988) for an appraisal of Aristotelian souls and their relationship with nature. See also Park and Kessler (1988) on humanist modifications of psychology. Aristotle 1935, p. 137.

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this intimate union between mind and world, and build an uninterrupted passage from words to things. Essentialist verbal reference seems secure throughout Aristotle’s Organon, where the reified and precise linguistic taxonomies of species and genera, accidents and essences that we saw peddled by logicians map things in the world.13 He slides between the linguistic and epistemological– ontological planes with unbroken and unselfconscious ease. For example, he asserts that ‘things are univocally named, when not only they bear the same name but the name means the same in each case – has the same definition corresponding. Thus a man and an ox are called ‘‘animals’’. The name is the same in both cases; so also the statement of essence.’14 Aristotle reiterates his commitment to linguistic–real continuity when he states that ‘the truth of propositions consists in corresponding with the facts’.15 Before we turn from this mighty source to its streams we ought to remind ourselves of the non-judgemental simplicity of the concepts which words signify – a presumption the logicians repeat unflinchingly. For Aristotle, concepts of substances are, like the words which signify them, single units. We remember his statement that nouns are like concepts, ‘neither combined nor disjoined’.16 ‘Man’, like ‘white’, has a singular denotation; nothing is affirmed or denied of it and it is therefore neither true nor false.17 Aristotle’s realism,18 along with his unitary representation of concepts– things and their numerical fit with words dispatches a view of language that penetrates almost effortlessly, directly, and without the possibility of error, to the heart of things. His scholastic successors hotly debate the extent to which the linguistic– epistemological framework matches the world, although it is generally agreed that a mental operation of abstraction derives the universal from the particular. Towards one extreme are the ‘moderate realists’, or Thomists.19 Aquinas had maintained that ‘something becomes actually intelligible insofar as it is in some way abstracted from matter’.20 But while concept and thing are thus distinct, the ‘essences’ or ‘natures’ of 13

14 16 18

19

20

E.g. Aristotle 1938b, pp. 153–5. Cf. Lear 1988, p. 267: ‘the reason that a linguistic predication, like man is [a] rational animal is true is that a certain predication exists in reality’. Aristotle 1938a, p. 13. 15 Aristotle 1938b, p. 139. Aristotle 1938b, p. 117. 17 Aristotle 1938b, p. 117. I use ‘realism’ quite generally, to indicate a linguistic–real correspondence, in addition and in relation to the context of the nominalist/realist debate about universals. I take this account of the debate from Bolton 1998a, pp. 178–9. Utz (1995) argues for the importance of nominalism in late medieval texts, against Huizinga’s downplaying of it. Aquinas 1998, p. 439.

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things ‘exist in two ways . . . in one way in singular and in another way in the soul’, that is in things and in the intellect, and can be signified by words.21 By contrast, the ‘nominalists’ or Ockhamists deny any universality in things, restricting it to concepts and names. General concepts or names hook on to things by virtue of their similarity to (rather than identity with) them. Francisco Sua´rez, the Counter-Reformation scholastic writing at the turn of the sixteenth century, delivers a rich, robust synthesis of the medieval positions. Denying ‘that the nature is universal in reality’, he argues that a particular individual is ‘placed under the species according to mental comparison or logical consideration’.22 However, the basis for conceptual universality is real similarity between the forms of individuals. Forms do exist in things, but they are particular to individuals.23 ‘A man consists of a body as matter and of a rational soul as form. Therefore, this soul is the substantial form.’24 When we think generally about things we compare similar individuals and abstract from them. While individual substances might not share the same substantial form, they each have one, and these can be known and named. Moreover, they can be compared on the basis of real similarity and considered as one species with one essence that has been abstracted from reality. There may not be an idyllic identity between reality and perception but there is a beam that girds them together and it is based on essential resemblance. Language can look through to the world. If we look to the end of the seventeenth century we find an Aristotelianism – filtered by a corpuscularian Blackloism – in Sergeant’s Method.25 ‘The impressions from objects that affect the senses, and by them the soul, do carry the very nature of those objects along with them, and imprint them in the soul.’26 The essences of things, ideas in God before their creation, exist both corporeally and intellectually. The ‘verity’ 21 22

23

24 25

26

Aquinas 1998, p. 463. Sua´rez 1982, p. 33 (cf. ibid: ‘Every thing, insofar as it exists in reality, be singular and individual’); p. 30. Sua´rez 1982, p. 107: ‘the specific notion is said to be taken absolutely from form. [This is so] because it [i.e. form] confers the last complement, and presupposes only matter as something potential and indifferent’; p. 109: ‘form is more than anything else the principle of individuation’. Sua´rez 1982, p. 182. Phemister (1993, p. 249) presents Aristotle as Sergeant’s ‘master-builder’. Southgate (2000) depicts Sergeant as following in the vehemently anti-sceptical, pro-demonstration footsteps of Thomas White. Sergeant 1696, p. 2. Southgate (2000, pp. 296–8) explains that according to Sergeant’s empiricism, atomic ‘effluvia’ from objects are present in the brain; N.B. also pp. 300–2, White’s and Sergeant’s concerns about language and the trustworthiness of common use which embodies the common sense of the community.

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of our mental-linguistic judgements is based in their literal ‘conformity’ with things.27 Sergeant reveals the persistence of the view that concepts are isomorphic with things, and that therefore words, which signify concepts, import the world. While concepts resemble things in the Aristotelian story, words do not resemble their cargo, as the multiplicity of tongues proves. As Aristotle elaborates in De interpretatione, ‘a noun is a sound having meaning established by convention alone’.28 However, the arbitrary relationship between res and verba did not go uncontested. The recovery of Plato’s Cratylus, together with various Adamite, Hermetic, Cabalistic, Hieroglyphic, Neoplatonic and Chinese traditions, advertised the possibility of a natural link between word and thing.29 Hermogenes explains Cratylus’ position. ‘Every thing has a right name of its own, which comes by nature, and . . . a name is not whatever people call a thing by agreement . . . but . . . there is a kind of inherent correctness in names, which is the same for all men, both Greeks and barbarians’.30 Each thing has an ‘ideal name’ that manifests its ‘essence’ or ‘class’.31 As with Aristotle, an essentialist classificatory framework underpins Plato’s theory of language. But, unlike Aristotle’s forms, Plato’s ideas exist eternally, prior to and separate from the particular ephemera of the material world. His dramatis personae spend the long central section of the dialogue probing various etymologies, whose component parts sum up the nature of the things named.32 Having come to the obstacle that these component parts must themselves have conventional roots, Cratylus goes on to explore the sounds of syllables themselves. He muses on their onomatopoeic potential, for example on the ‘smoothness, softness’ of the lambda and the ‘speed’ of ‘rho’. ‘Representing by likeness’ makes words perfectly transparent. They become inherently instructive; ‘he who knows the names knows also the things named’.33 Knowledge of this ideal language is equivalent to philosophical knowledge. To know the words is to know the things. 27 29

30 32

33

Sergeant 1696, pp. 4; 3; 118. 28 Aristotle 1938b, pp. 115; 117. Coudert (1978) explores early-modern natural language theories. Katz (1981) traces the search for Adam’s language, particularly its connection with Hebrew (pp. 141–5). Vickers (1984, pp. 97–115) discerns a difference between the new science and magic on the basis of their subscription to conventional/natural languages respectively. Bianchi (2002) explores the Natursprache in Bo¨hme and Paracelsus. See also Mercer (2000) on humanist Platonism in seventeenth-century Germany. Plato 1939, p. 7. 31 Plato 1939, pp. 27; 41; 45. See Williams (1994) on the dialogue’s powerfully anti-mimetic conclusions; Sedley (1998) on the contemporary seriousness of the mimetic proposal; Borchardt (1995) on its place in the renaissance. Plato 1939, pp. 171; 169; 175.

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I end this section by pulling out two spanners that Socrates throws in to the works of Cratylus’ Eden. The first questions the rigid reality of the verbal scheme with an example that was to resonate down the centuries: the ‘unnatural birth’ which suggests that language might not map the world. Socrates asks ‘if any offspring that is not human should be born from a human being, should that offspring be called a human being’?34 The second criticism ends the dialogue. Incredulous at Cratylus’ proposal, Socrates posits the ultimate alterity and opacity of words. Having indulged in the fantasy of etymological investigation, he raises the problem of infinite regress. The elements that make up the etymologies are themselves opaque signs. Onomatopoeia is no real refuge, limited in its referential scope and itself dependent on convention.35 The Aristotelian–Platonic traditions do not transmit an immaculately realist conception of language. In various ways the mind intervenes and modifies the world, generalising from the particular. The world may not be exactly the ordered place we describe. But notwithstanding these destabilising factors, language is fastened tightly to the essences of things, albeit arbitrarily – although the mirage of a natural link shimmers seductively and tenaciously. realist, essentialist hangovers: bacon, universal language and the recovery of eden The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed the transformation of the multi-faceted but broadly Aristotelian world-view that had captivated European philosophers. This process was as evolutionary as it was revolutionary and it took many forms – which divided the ‘revolutionaries’ from each other as much as they were divided from their common enemy. But, very generally speaking, the new philosophers rejected intentional species and substantial forms as chimerical and replaced them with matter and motion. The paradigm shift from animism to mechanism had radical consequences not only for the linguistic classifications that supposedly mapped the world, but also for language’s capacity to reach out to it and grasp its core.36 However, as testament to the continuing mentalite´, 34 36

Plato 1939, pp. 41; 39. 35 Plato 1939, pp. 131; 173–5. On the relationship between science and language see: Jones (1965 and 1971) for the traditional view of seventeenth-century antipathy towards language and its perceived incompatibility with science; Waswo (1999a) on the ‘deontologizing’ of language in the renaissance (p. 28) and its ‘reontologizing’ (p. 33) in the seventeenth century; Waswo (1987) puts a similar point another way,

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many philosophers maintained an essentialist and realist portrait of language.37 Bacon occupies a pivotal position in this story not only because he balances between Aristotelianism and atomism but also because he, seminally, moves language to the centre of the philosophical stage. For him it is both a renovative tool for, and an intractable obstacle to knowledge. I turn first to his optimistic characterisation. With Aristotle and Adam ringing in his ears, Bacon envisages a marriage between mind and world. The latter is not to be shrunk to the poor confines of the former, but ‘the understanding is rather to be expanded and widened to receive the image of the universe as it is found to be’.38 In his poetic crescendo to The Great Instauration, Bacon mines more visual metaphors to demonstrate his plan: All depends on keeping the mind’s eye fixed on things themselves, so that their images are received exactly as they are. For God forbid that we should give out a dream of our imagination for a pattern of the world; but may He rather grant of His grace that we may write a revelation or true vision of the footsteps and imprint of the Creator upon created things.39

37

38

39

noting a shift from ‘relational’ to ‘referential’ semantics; Foucault (1970) traces a move from a ‘resemblance’ (chapter 2) to a ‘representational’ (chapter 3) episteme, whereby words come out of the world and transparently map it; Fish (1972, p. 381) on the triumph of the plain style; Vickers (1984) on the distinctive attitude of the new scientists towards language; Monfasani (1988, p. 211) on the new scientists’ ‘challenge’ to classical rhetoric; Salmon (1972) ascribes the seventeenthcentury’s ‘profound dissatisfaction with language’ (p. v) to scientific transformations, in addition to persecution-driven migration and the explosion of trade (p. 3); Croll (1966) on the ‘plain’ effects of science on style. A.C. Howell (1971) argues that with the development of the new science, ‘res’ changed its meaning from ‘subject matter’ to ‘things’ in the seventeenth century; while this verdict overlooks the unstinting mentalism of the period (and the referential ambitions of the years preceding) there was definitely an explicit turn towards the (metaphorical!) book of nature, as opposed to the books of the ancients. For a wide variety of revisionist accounts, see Blair 1999; Davies 1987; Dear 1985; Golinski 1990a; Kroll 1991; Kroll 1992, pp. 16–24; Rutherford 1995; Steadman 1984; Stillman 1995; Vickers 1985; Vickers 1987. See Dear (1988, pp. 170–200) on the new, essentialist linguistic systems of the seventeenth century which ‘proposed that essential natures could be known behind appearances and that individuals could be grouped into species accordingly’ (p. 188); Bolton (1998a) on the replacement of Aristotelian essentialism with alternative forms. Bacon 1994c, p. 304. Cf. Bacon (1994a, p. 13) on the near passive reception of the rays of things by the mirror of the mind: ‘I, on the other hand, have not taken my attention off them longer than was needed for their image and rays to meet (as happens in the case of vision) with the result that very little is left for the power and superiority of intelligence.’ See Briggs (1989 (e.g. p. viii)) on Bacon’s restorative project; Rossi (1986, p. 9) on Bacon’s ‘cult of nature’ which would ‘reestablish contact between man and reality’. Snider (1994) argues that Bacon legitimated his project by appropriating the power of the origo. Bacon 1994a, p. 30.

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Bacon’s new logic prepares ‘the bridal chamber of the mind and the universe’, whose progeny will be ‘help for mankind’. Echoing the Aristotelian ambition to get closer to what is ‘more knowable to nature’, his axioms will be ‘such as Nature would really recognize as better known to herself, and which lie at the very marrow of things’. The aim is nothing less than a restoration of the understanding to its ‘original condition, or at least to improve that commerce between Mind and Things’.40 Since it was the ‘greed’ for moral, not natural, knowledge that caused Adam’s Fall, we can and may recover that ‘pure and spotless natural knowledge’ if we labour at it, thanks to God’s curse/dispensation that ‘in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat thy bread’.41 The remembering of primordial knowledge includes the restitution of a language that perfectly reflects things, that gives ‘names to all things according to their kind’.42 Drawing on the powerful figurative reserves of vision, sexual intercourse and the garden of Eden, Bacon paints a beguiling portrait of the possible union between the mind (and language) and the world.43 Ideally, words should simply transcribe things, adding no interpretation of their own.44 Bacon’s ambition to make experience ‘literate’ evokes an unmediated intimacy between language and experience.45 When he advises on appropriate style, he instructs us to ‘avoid’ the ‘treasury of eloquence’, and instead ‘set forth’ everything ‘briefly and concisely’. Here words are submissive and loyal representatives of things; they are logically interchangeable. Natural philosophers are ‘faithful secretaries, who only

40 41

42 43

44

45

Bacon 1994a, pp. 24–5; 21; 3. Bacon 1994a, p. 15; 1994b, p. 292. See Sessions (1996) on the centrality of discontinuity (temporal, representational and epistemological) since the Fall and for the ‘syncopated therapy’ (p. 47) of Bacon’s work. On the relation of God and Adam to language, see Readings (1985). See Markley (1993) on the rupture between the ineffable and absolute word of God and fallen language, and contemporary attempts to accommodate the two; Bono (1995) on the divergence between the Word of God and the languages of man. See also Aarsleff 1999. On the importance of Adam and his Fall for the seventeenth century more generally see Almond 1999. Harrison 2002 and Poole 2005. See Smith (1989, p. 341) on the sectarian attempt in the mid-seventeenth century to make human language ‘embody the divine’. See, by contrast, De Grazia (1995) on the secularisation of language in the seventeenth century; Hunter (2000) on the desacralisation of philosophy; Rudavsky (2001) on Galileo’s and Spinoza’s secularisation of theology. Bacon 1994a, p. 15. See Bennett and Mandelbrote (1998) on biblical metaphorical resources; Le Doeuff (1990) on Baconian science as gardening; Merchant (1980) on extinguishing and raping nature. He says that natural history must be ‘free of anything philological’, by which he refers to the philologus, the hermeneut (1994a, p. 6). Bacon 1994b, p. 109. According to McCanles (1990), Bacon submits to the impracticable desire for Derridean presence.

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take hold of and write down the laws of Nature themselves and nothing else’.46 What are these things that language is meant devotedly to reflect? If Interpretatio naturae goes according to plan, they are ‘forms’, or ‘true specific differences’.47 These are not Aristotle’s fictional and teleological substantial forms, but the ‘laws’ by which qualities or ‘simple natures’, ‘such as heat, light, weight,’ are produced.48 Forms do not really exist as such, ‘for nothing truly exists in Nature except separate bodies performing separate pure actions, in conformity with a law’. These laws or forms exist ‘in philosophy’. They are the true genera of Nature, ‘better known (notior naturae)’ to her.49 While Bacon has exiled souls from the world, it is still organised essentially (though Bacon’s essences refer to qualities such as yellowness, rather than substances such as ‘gold’). And these natural essences and the laws that govern them can be perfectly known and named. Bacon’s belief that qualities are constitutive of substances is an experiential way of describing the world which we shall see running through to Locke. Instead of having one substantial essence, substances are: a troop or collection of simple natures; thus in gold the following occur together: that which is yellow; that which is heavy, up to a certain weight; that which is malleable or ductile, to a certain extent; that which is not volatile, and is not consumed by fire; that which becomes fluid, to a certain degree; that which can be separated and dissolved by certain means; and so on, through all the natures that are united in gold. An axiom of this kind therefore derives the thing from the forms of simple natures.50

Substances are ‘compound forms’, or ‘conjunctions of simple natures occurring in the ordinary course of the world’.51 Knowledge of ‘the forms of yellowness, weight, ductility, fixity, fluidity, solutions, and so on, and the means of superinducing them’ would enable alchemy52. Moreover, substances or ‘species’ can be named unproblematically because we have clear(ish) notions of them53. While Bacon’s specific ambitions for substantial knowledge are subsequently discarded, his description of substances as collections of simple qualities or appearances impacts forcefully on subsequent philosophers. 46 47

48 50 53

Bacon 1994c, pp. 303; 312. Cf. Vickers (1991 and 2000) on Bacon’s accommodation with language. Bacon 1994b, p. 133. See Jardine (1990) and Malherbe (1996) on Baconian method; Rossi (1996, p. 29) on Bacon’s ‘via media inter experimentiam et dogmata’. Bacon 1994b, p. 170. 49 Bacon 1994b, pp. 170; 135; 137. Bacon 1994b, p. 137. 51 Bacon 1994b, p. 169. 52 Bacon 1994b, pp. 137–8. Bacon 1994b, pp. 46–7; 65.

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The depth of Bacon’s belief in the intimacy of language and the world also appears in his representation of the world as linguistic. As letters are ‘the elements of all discourse’, forms are, like ‘letters of the alphabet’, the elements of nature.54 Writing in the grip of what Foucault has suggestively, if problematically, characterised as the Renaissance episteme, which sees nature rife with signs and resemblances, Bacon urges us to read what Descartes calls ‘the great book of the world’.55 When the natural historian writes out the world, he is copying ‘the volume of the works of God, and . . . another book of holy scripture’. He should therefore attend to the task ‘with a most religious care’. When we interpret nature we are reading ‘the ideas of the divine mind . . . the genuine signatures and marks impressed on created things, as they are found to be’.56 Bacon therefore balances between penetrative–essentialist and superficial–experiential accounts of knowledge and language, between a language of nature and a mirage of dynamic experience. In addition to transforming the building blocks of language from substances, qualities and experience, Bacon stimulates a plethora of linguistic projects.57 When he comes to the ‘organ of tradition’ of ‘rational knowledge’ in his navigation through learning, he finds that it is ‘not enquired, but deficient’. While the most familiar and fruitful organ is ‘speech or writing’, words are not the only means of communicating thoughts. Before we look at the alternatives, let us note the square inclusion of thoughts in Bacon’s linguistic theory. ‘Words are the images of cogitations’, he declares, expressly quoting Aristotle.58 However, while Bacon takes mentalism for granted, he does not keep it to the fore. He entitles the section ‘De notis rerum ’, begins it ‘These Notes of Cogitations’, and concludes it with a discussion of ‘notes of things’. This brings out the familiar ambiguity of the Latin res and its English translation – ‘thing’. These terms waver between external objects and 54

55

56

57 58

Bacon 1994a, p. 26. Cf. 1994b, p. 122 for another comparison of forms to ‘the letters of the alphabet’. Descartes 1985c, p. 115. Foucault 1970, chapter 2 (although at pp. 51–2 he locates Bacon in the ‘representational’ episteme of the seventeenth century). See Maclean (1998) for a stunning engagement with Foucault; Reiss (1973) for a version of Foucault’s argument; Roseman (1999) for a Foucaultian reading of scholasticism. See Geneva (1995) on the continuing ‘symbolic universe’ (p. 264) in the seventeenth century; Drake (1973) on Galileo’s attempt to move language closer to nature; Maclean (1984 and 2002) on natural and bodily signs respectively; Westerhoff (2001) on Baroque pansemioticism. Bacon 1994c, p. 311; 1994b, p. 49; cf. 1994b, p. 126: ‘the Creator’s true stamp upon created things, printed and defined on matter by true and precise lines’. See Eco (1995) for an overview of the two thousand year old quest for the perfect language. Bacon 1996b, pp. 231; 230.

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internal thoughts and are often used to refer to both. This confusion signals a general forgetfulness – or repression – by early-modern philosophers, of the tripartite linguistic paradigm to which they subscribe. There are two forms of notae rerum. One is ‘ex congruo’ and has ‘some similitude or congruity with the notion’.59 While Bacon himself rejects ‘Plato’s’ proposals, these recall Cratylic, as well as Adamic, names.60 Bacon’s congruent names include ‘Hieroglyphs’, or Egyptian ideograms. ‘Gestures’ or ‘transitory Hieroglyphs’ are also ranked in the category of natural signs. He exemplifies them with the story of Periander who communicated his intention to restrain rebellious nobles by cutting off the tops of the tallest flowers in his garden. The second form of notes are established ‘ad placitum, having force only by contract or acceptation’.61 As well as words, these include ‘Real Characters’ which bypass (spoken) words and represent ‘things and notions’ directly62. There must be as many characters as there are ‘radical words’63. Chinese is Bacon’s example of this kind of arbitrary script, unmediated by sound, which ‘can be read off by each nation in their own language’ and which captures the fecund imaginations of his successors.64 In 1669 John Webb, for example, writes An Historical Essay Endeavouring a Probability that the Language of the empire of China is the Primitive Language. Bacon’s brief exhortations are the seeds of the universal or philosophical language projects that flourish between his death and about 1680. In addition to facilitating international communication, these projects aim to bring language closer to things.65 In addition to Babel, Adam towers over seventeenth-century writers. As Milton ventriloquises for the first philosophical speaker: I nam’d them, as they pass’d, and understood Their nature, with such knowledge God endu’d My sudden apprehension66

Early-modern philosophers, and the philosophical language theorists in particular, yearn to recover this language that contained the nature of things. 59 60 61

62 64 65

66

Bacon 1857, iv, p. 440; 1996b, p. 231. See Aarsleff 1982, pp. 278–92, and Vickers 1984. Bacon 1857, iv, p. 441. Bacon 1996b, p. 231. See Ashworth (1990) on the relationship between emblems (natural signs) and natural history; Bono (1999) on the eclipse of the emblematic world view; Russell (1999) on the emblematic genre in the Renaissance. Bacon 1857, iv, p. 439. 63 Bacon 1996b, p. 230. Bacon 1857, iv, p. 439. See Mungello (1998) on European philosophical responses to China. Bacon himself follows his discussion of notae rerum with a proposal for a ‘philosophical grammar’ that might provide ‘an antidote against the curse of the confusion of tongues’ (1957, iv, pp. 440–1), a juxtaposition of themes that subsequent writers would fuse. Milton 1989, pp. 184–5. Locke owned Paradise Lost (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 189).

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Some take the high road of natural signs. In his China illustrata (1677) Athanasius Kircher explains how, following the Egyptians, Chinese writing is based ‘on pictures drawn from natural things’, such as ‘animals, birds, reptiles, herbs’. ‘There are as many characters as there are concepts which the mind wishes to express’.67 This comment reminds us that despite all the talk about things in this movement, we are still firmly in a mentalist frame. Kircher’s own Ars magna sciendi sive combinatoria (1669) is a massive ‘key’ to all things, reminiscent of the Lullist, encyclopaedic tradition.68 Its basic ‘elements’, out of which everything can be expressed by means of their ‘combination’, are supposedly self-explanatory pictures, such as õ and€.69 Another remarkable exemplar of this tradition is John Bulwer’s Chirologia, or, The Natural Language of the Hand, Composed of the Speaking Motions, and Discoursing Gestures thereof (1644). This applauds gesture which, being ‘purely naturall, not positive’ speaks louder than words. This non-verbal form of communication is universally and immediately intelligible. ‘Our pregnant minde’ is not nearly so well delivered by the vocal ‘midwife’. Bulwer locates his project within the twin religious contexts of Adam and Babel – whose falling self and tumbling walls missed ‘this naturall language of the hand’.70 While the idyll of the divine tongue lies behind most reformatory language schemes of the period, for some enthusiastic contemporaries it is much more than a dream. Jacob Boehme was lucky enough to be blessed with divine sight, ‘to see through the poisonful heart of the basilisk, and see the day of restitution of all whatever Adam lost’71. His Signatura rerum (1635) discloses ‘the language of nature’, the ‘essences and forms’ of things72. His Clavis (1642) explains that those whom God has inspired can read this ‘living outflowing word of God’.73 John Webster, an admirer of the ‘divinely-inspired Teutonick’, echoes the desire for ‘the true original tongue’. Nature is ‘so many significant and lively characters, or hieroglyphicks of his invisible power, providence and divine wisdom’. Webster’s is an essentialist world which we know via the senses.74 Feeling 67

68 70 71 73

74

Kircher 1987, pp. 217; 214; 214–15. Locke owned this text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 166). See Elsky 1989 and Singer 1995. Cornelius (1965) investigates the relationship between the imaginary languages that are reported from imaginary voyages, and the scientific interest in rediscovering or making a perfect or artificial language that represents reality. See Rossi (2000) on this tradition. 69 Kircher 1669, sig. V2r [p. 155]; sig. Ss4v [p. 328]. Bulwer 1644, sig. B2r [p. 3]; sig. B2v [p. 4]; sig. B4r [p. 7]. Boehme 1912, p. 64. 72 Boehme 1912, p. 12. Boehme 1647, p. 20. See Coudert (1991) on the search for the divine language in the century; Thune (1948) for a study of the Behemenists and Philadelphians in England. J. Webster 1970, pp. 90; 101; 103; 108.

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keenly ‘the general blindness, and curse upon the sons of Adam’, he vacillates between wanting a universal language of arbitrary symbols which would ‘repair the ruines of Babell’, and ‘the paradisical language of the out-flown word which Adam understood while he was unfaln in Eden’.75 Many of Bacon’s successors take his injunction to investigate notae rerum as an order to make language mirror the corresponding orders of thoughts and things. In doing so, they are like Janus, looking back to Adam and forward to their new philosophical invention. They want to wipe clean the old, erroneous slate, and forge a language that fits the new – or not so new – world they are discovering in the scientific ferment of the period. Comenius expresses frustration with unrealistic language in his Via lucis (1668). ‘Words are attached to things without regard to the nature of the things themselves.’76 In his Janua he declares, ‘without boasting’, that ‘I shew thee the whole world, and all the latin tongue’. In the thick of this compendious volume, in the section on the body, the entry on the ‘eye’ is instructive of the sense-based realism of the author. It is ‘a looking glasse, receiving into it selfe the resemblances of things set before it’.77 The mind is not an obstacle, or even a modifier of the world, but serves as a clear channel to language, or, as he puts it in Via lucis, ‘a funnel through which wisdom would flow’. The ‘course’ of the ‘universal language’ ought to be ‘parallel with the course of things’. There ought to be as many names as there are things, and the words should be joined ‘with the utmost precision as things are joined to each other’. Comenius even toys with the ‘harmonious’ potential of this language; by ‘its very sounds it would express the essential qualities and characteristics of things’.78 Cynical about the restoration of a naturally significant language of nature, but sympathetic to the universalist and encyclopaedic cause, a flurry of gentlemen build their own linguistic arks.79 While Seth Ward lampoons Webster for his ‘hieroglypticall’ pretensions, he does not stint from carving out a role for a ‘universall character’ in his riposte (Vindiciae academiarum, 1654).80 Having thought he could devise symbols ‘for every thing and notion’, but finding them too many, he alighted on the idea of making symbols stand for ‘simple notions’ which could then be 75 77 79

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J. Webster 1970, pp. 77; 106; 107; 109. 76 Comenius 1938, p. 185. Comenius 1643, sig. D1v; sig. F3v. 78 Comenius 1938, pp. 186; 183; 186. On the universal language movement, see Cram 1985; Clauss 1995; DeMott 1958; Knowlson 1975 and 1995; Stillman 1995. See Salmon (1972) on the movement in general and on Lodwick in particular; Slaughter (1982) on the continuing essentialist taxonomic Aristotelianism of the projects. Formigari (1988, p. 133) notes the continuity between mystical and universal language theorists, both concerned for language to mirror reality. Ward 1970, p. 214. On his debate with Webster see Debus 1968 and Debus 1970.

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‘compounded’ and thereby ‘represent to the very eye all the elements of their composition, & so deliver the natures of things’. This would be ‘reall learning’. Indeed, preens Ward, it ‘might not unjustly be termed a naturall language’ because the word would reflect the composite nature of the thing. Revealing the way in which the mind was considered little obstruction to the world, as well as an integral part of language, Ward rebuts Webster’s accusations of unreal academic speech with the following rhetorical questions. ‘Was there ever, or can there be a disputation about anything else but notions? Would he have them bring forth bread and cheese and dispute de gustibus?’81 Lodwick enters the field energetically. The language described in Of an Universall Reall Caracter (c. 1663) will, if underpinned by philosophical insight, ‘much assist to the true knowledge of things’.82 In his GroundWork, or Foundation Laid, (or so intended) for the Framing of a New Perfect Language (1652), it looks as though it is the old hylomorphic world that is the basis for his language: he explains how proper names ought to be gathered under their ‘species or individuums’, such as ‘man’ or ‘horse’. He also reminds us that mentalism is compatible with realism. Speech, he tells us, is the ‘expression of the minde or thoughts’.83 George Dalgarno, a particularly sophisticated member of the movement, is predominantly concerned that his universal language serve the cause of universal communication more than the truth of things.84 However, an unmistakably philosophical motivation still seeps into his plans. When he announces them in his News to the Whole World, he declares that his language ‘shall be more accommodated for an emphatick delivery of real truths’.85 In his Ars signorum, vulgo character universalis et lingua philosophica (1661), Dalgarno explains that in order to know what ‘signs’ are needed, it is first necessary to examine ‘the nature of things themselves’, metaphysics and logic paralleling grammar just as signs parallel signified.86 Again, although language is being brought closer to nature thereby, the mind does not disappear from the equation. It is the sounds that are eradicated, not the ‘affections of the mind’.87 At about the same time (c. 1661) Isaac Newton drafted Of an Universall Language. His was intended to be ‘deduced . . . from ye natures of things themselves’.88 It begins with ‘an alphabeticall table 81 83 85 87

88

Ward 1970, pp. 215; 216; 235. 82 Lodwick 1972b, fo. 34v [p. 225]. Lodwick 1972a, sig. B2v [p. 211]; sig. A3r [p. 204]. 84 Cram and Maat 2001, pp. 22; 29. Dalgarno 2001b, p. 110. 86 Dalgarno 2001c, p. 177. Dalgarno 2001a, p. 90. See Cram and Maat (2001) for an incisive analysis of Dalgarno’s projects, and particularly for his pragmatic (as opposed to realistic) approach to logico-linguistic schemes. Newton 1957, p. 7. See Elliott 1957, pp. 1–7.

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of all substances (as of Angell, House, Man, I, thou, hee,) or affections (as glorious thing, beautiful thing, loving thing . . . )’. These ‘bare names of things’, symbolically represented, are then related to each other in the same way that the things themselves are related.89 John Wilkins’ Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668) is the most extravagant English contribution to the movement. He emphasises the interdependence of language and true knowledge. ‘The theory it self, upon which such a design were to be founded, should be exactly suited to the nature of things.’ He lays out the ‘universal philosophy’, or ‘a just enumeration of all such things and notions, to which names are to be assigned’. His ‘real character’ is the ‘shortest and plainest way for the attainment of real knowledge’.90 In a way that is reminiscent of Porphyry’s tree, of mnemonic–encyclopaedic arts, of Ramus’ dichotomous charts and Bacon’s tables of experience, he carves the universe into its constituent parts. Dalgarno claimed that Wilkins follows ‘that which is called new philosophy’, rejecting essentialist definitions because ‘the formes of things, if there were any such, were unknown to us’.91 Certainly, the tables themselves stray far beyond nature, classifying things as diverse and manufactured as ‘pickling’, ‘contract’ and ‘calumny’.92 The descriptions of substances in the tables consist of superficial and practical details, such as ‘flint’, which Wilkins elucidates as ‘more knobbed and unequal; used for the striking of fire’.93 However, in the preparatory material, he sounds far more committed to the essentialised, knowable world of Aristotelian logicians. He has drawn up, he tells us, ‘tables of substance, or the species of natural bodies, reduced under their several heads’. Recalling the simple, almost passively received concepts of the scholastics which are incapable of truth or falsity, he explains that he has reduced ‘all simple things and notions’ into his tables.94 Resurrecting those unitary apprehensions of substances that one might expect him to leave for dead, he refers to ‘that conceit which men have in their minds concerning a horse or tree’ which is ‘the notion or mental image of that beast, or natural thing’.95 (Note, again, the Aristotelian mentalism that is not an object but a passage to reality.) When he 89 90

91 93

Newton 1957, pp. 7; 8. Wilkins 1968, pp. 21; 20; sig. b1v. For an archival archaeology of the movement that produced Wilkins’ Essay and of the work itself, see Lewis 2003. For various interpretations of Wilkins’ project see Aarsleff (1982, pp. 239–77) on its Adamic/conventional nature; Davies (1987) on Wilkins’ purely figural map of things; Subbiondo (1992) for an appraisal of the context and content of Wilkins’ Essay and his aim for an isomorphism between language and reality. Dalgarno 2001d, pp. 367–8. 92 Wilkins 1968, pp. 261; 263; 273. Wilkins 1968, p. 61. 94 Wilkins 1968, sig. b2v. 95 Wilkins 1968, p. 20.

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comes to ‘natural grammar’, he declares that some of the radical words, or ‘integrals’, ‘signifie some entire thing or notion: whether the ens or thing itself, or the essence: of a thing’.96 Regardless of the contradictory currents that run through Wilkins’ Essay, pulling it now to reality and the scholastic textbooks of his youth, now to appearance and the mechanised vision of his peers, its ambition is clear and familiar: to map the world as we know it.97 His characters are compounded in such a way that ‘we should, by learning the character, and the names of things, be instructed likewise in their natures’.98 All these writers are engaged in bringing language into congruence with things. Sprat echoes this desire in his History of the Royal-Society (1667). He wants a return to the time ‘when men deliver’d so many things, in almost an equal number of words’.99 While this pervasive and polemical dualism must not blind us either to the simultaneous mentalism of these most ‘thing’-focused of language theorists,100 or to the wide scope of the word ‘thing’, neither should we be deaf to the hushed elision of the difference between concepts and things that gives the impression of an unmediated language of things.101 The mind does not obviously distort the world for any of these theorists, even if they differ about what kind of world it represents. In the logics we saw a realist, essentialist view of language. We see this duplicated by seventeenth-century philosophers of language who also blithely propose a language that names things essentially. realist, essentialist hangovers: rationalist penetration One might think that the Cartesians, distrusting the senses, would proffer a severely curtailed account of referential language. However, their words remain stringently connected to the world in two ways. First, in a move central to the new philosophy, Descartes’ rejection of the Aristotelian isomorphism between experience and reality is softened by his claim that our sensations are caused by things even though they do not resemble 96 97

98 101

Wilkins 1968, p. 298. See Cram and Maat (2001, pp. 26–9) on Wilkins’ complex approach to his Aristotelian heritage and on his agreements and disputes with Dalgarno; Aarsleff (1982, pp. 262–4) on the failure of Wilkins’ predetermined inventory to capture the variety of things, as evidenced by John Ray’s complaints about the unnatural constraints of the botanical tables; DeMott (1957) on the antipathy between natural science and the rigid universal language projects. Wilkins 1968, p. 21. 99 Sprat 1959, p. 113. 100 E.g. Wilkins 1968, p. 20. In a moment of reflection on the issue that is rare in early-modern texts, Hobbes (1981, p. 16) tells us that a ‘thing’ or res is any ‘nominatum’, whether existent or purely thought.

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them.102 Second, and with a confidence which rivals the Aristotelians, Descartes, by substituting the eye of the mind for the real eye, makes up for the poor representational content of our sensations and arrives at real description. By overturning Aristotle’s dictum that all natural knowledge must be derived from the senses, Descartes meets the sceptic head-on.103 He puts the sceptic in checkmate by moving in the queenly intellect, a faculty completely independent of the weak and fictionalising senses: ‘even bodies are not strictly perceived by the senses or the faculty of imagination but by the intellect alone’.104 Descartes’ confidence in the power of the intellect should not lead us to ignore the obstructions that he feels the sensations, images and passions of the body pose to that power.105 One of the most treacherous of all sensible things is language. In his second meditation, in trying to discover what this ‘I’ is that necessarily exists, he gets tangled in the infinite regresses of scholastic definitions, and moves deeper into the gloom, from ‘man’, to ‘rational’, to ‘animal’. Only after wrenching himself out of this verbal hole and proceeding to probe his extended ‘self’ does he come to what he truly is: res cogitans.106 However, for the most part, the tug of the body is suppressed – or repressed? – by the might of the intellect. Descartes emerges as a striking realist. Objects that ‘formally’ exist in the world exist ‘objectively’ in the mind: ‘although the reality which I am considering in my ideas is merely objective reality, I must not on that account suppose that the same reality need not exist formally in the causes of my ideas, but that it is enough for it to be present in them objectively’.107 102 103

104 105

106 107

Descartes 1984a, p. 55. Descartes 1985c, p. 129. Descartes adds to the ancient sceptical challenge the possibility (which he rejects) that there might not be a world outside at all and that it might all be a dream (1984a, p. 15). Descartes 1984a, p. 22. See Moriarty (2003) for a brilliant and complex account of how early-modern French thinkers – Descartes, Pascal and Malebranche in particular – are suspicious of experience, with regard not only to nature, but to morality and theology too. He gives the important caveat that while Descartes does dismiss experience in some ways, he also reinstates our ‘ordinary, embodied way of experiencing, coloured, however with a new understanding of its significance for us’ (p. 249). Descartes 1984a, pp. 16–17. Descartes 1984a, p. 29. Yolton (2000) argues that Descartes is a realist for whom objects become known with ‘no ontic switch’ (p. 585). See Behan (2000) for a modified, historicised view which locates Descartes in the context of scholastic formal signs; Ayers (1998b, p. 1066) on Descartes’ view that objects such as the sun have ‘objective’ existence in the mind and ‘formal’ existence in the world. Hausman and Hausman (1997) attribute to Descartes ‘intentional ideas’ (p. xiv), which thereby (p. 26) escape the problem of representation. McCracken (1998) argues that while for Descartes, sensation tells us nothing qualitative about body, it plays ‘an indispensable roˆle in the proof that bodies exist’ (p. 628). Schmaltz (1997) proposes that Descartes has a nativist account of sensation which, motivated by his rejection of scholastic theory, is not as strange as it first appears.

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Descartes gets the courage of his convictions from his belief that ‘everything that we clearly and distinctly understand is true’, a belief he derives from the argument that God (who so exceeds Descartes that Descartes could not have invented him) cannot deceive because this would be to attribute to him an impossible imperfection.108 The irresistibility of clear and distinct cognition is invoked to fill the gaps and silence the questions in his demonstrations. In a somewhat circular move, he even uses it to prove God’s existence.109 The ‘mental gaze’ delivers essences that are ‘immutable and eternal, and not invented by me or dependent on my mind’.110 We have clear and distinct ideas of the two substances that exist (corporeal and intelligent) and of their essences. ‘Extension in length, breadth and depth constitutes the nature of corporeal substance; and thought constitutes the nature of thinking substance.’ Mind and body are divided from each other by a ‘real distinction’.111 Meditating towards the truth, Descartes leads us from his room, with its hot fire that melts the wax, into his mind. Purely intellectually, albeit struggling through sense and language, it grasps the ‘extension of the wax’, while the misleading, subjective images fall away. His inconstant sense perceptions (the faint, sweet ‘taste of honey’, or the fading ‘scent of the flowers from which it is gathered’, or ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ before and after heating) are not inherent to wax. Instead, its properties are ‘extended, flexible and changeable’. The mind strips away sensation to reveal true ideas. With steely precision, even violation, the infallible ‘I’ ‘distinguish[es] the wax from its outward forms – take[s] the clothes off, as it were, and consider[s] it naked’.112 Descartes submits that there are certain ‘eternal truths’ or ‘common notions’, such as: ‘it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be at the same time; what is done cannot be undone; he who thinks cannot but exist while he thinks’.113 These are ‘speculative truths which are known solely by means of the natural light’.114 These maxims (the like of which Locke will drown in scorn) enable us to reason to deep truths about the world. For example: we can . . . easily come to know a substance by one of its attributes, in virtue of the common notion that nothingness possesses no attributes, that is to say, no properties or qualities. Thus, if we perceive the presence of some attribute, we

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Descartes 1984a, pp. 9; 43. See Larmore (1998, pp. 1171–3) on Descartes’ inference from certainty to realist truth. Descartes 1984a, p. 47. 110 Descartes 1984a, pp. 44–5. 111 Descartes 1985e, pp. 210; 213. Descartes 1984a, pp. 21; 20–1; 22. 113 Descartes 1985e, p. 209. Descartes 1984a, p. 11.

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can infer that there must also be present an existing thing or substance to which it may be attributed.115

Descartes’ scepticism, his promulgated tentativeness, is a brash contrivance for a comprehensive account of the mechanistic truth about things. He threatens to cut the world loose from our mind when he repudiates the Aristotelian view that our perceptions somehow resemble the things that cause them.116 But while this novel disjunction will proceed to make less self-assured philosophers question the referential capacity of their words, it is no obstacle to Descartes. Freed from the sceptic’s shackles, Descartes’ descendants devise similarly essentialist and holistic dualist accounts of things. In De la recherche de la verite´ (1674–5), the book which was to provoke from Locke an excoriating review, Malebranche’s universals are eternal, immutable entities, existing independently of human minds. They are in God, who is ‘the intelligible world, or the place of the spirits, as the material world is the place of bodies’. We can understand these ideas by virtue of our soul’s union with God.117 For Spinoza in his Ethics (1677), there is one substance with infinite attributes of which we know two – the material and intellectual. They run in parallel with each other, as two aspects of the same thing.118 This foray into Cartesian philosophy serves two functions in my argument. The first is to counter the widespread assumption in the secondary literature that Cartesians considered language solely as the expression of thought, and that this constituted a rival theory of language.119 They did indeed, as we saw in the Grammaire and the Logique of 115 116

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Descartes 1985e, p. 210. For another example see p. 288. Descartes 1985b, p. 81. Della Rocca (2002) emphasises Descartes’ double commitment to certainty and doubt. Romanowski (1973) gives a distinctive account of the tension between science and discourse in Descartes. Jolley (1992, p. 417) describes Descartes’ pioneering and influential role in demolishing Aristotelianism and replacing it with the mechanical worldview. Garber (2001) emphasises the importance of Descartes’ physics in his wider project. Malebranche 1694, i.iii, pp. 124; 121. Locke had this translation (Harrison and Laslett 1965, pp. 182–3). See Larmore (1998, pp. 1174–5) on Malebranche’s concession to the sceptic that we cannot demonstrate the existence of material objects (which does not deter his otherwise grand and dogmatic claims for the truths of reason). On his fight with Arnauld over whether ideas are objects or acts of perception see Yolton 1987, pp. 319–23. Kremer (1997) characterises Arnauld as a representationalist, an interpretation for which he admits ‘there is little direct textual evidence’ (p. 77). Cf. Nadler (2000, pp. 4–5) on the anti-sceptical nature of Malebranche’s doctrine of ‘vision in God’. Spinoza 1994, pp. 9; 33. See Aquila (1978) on the identity of thought and object in Spinoza. Locke owned the Ethics in Spinoza’s Opera posthuma (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 238). On its rival status see Cohen 1977, p. xxi, and Padley 1985 and 1988, i. Chomsky (1966) singles out the Cartesians as presaging his own innatist, ‘deep structure’ linguistic theories. See Salmon (1972 pp. 12 and 34) on the Chomskianism of the universal language projects; Aarsleff (1982, pp. 101–19)

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Port-Royal, give an elaborate account of the mental discourse that informs the verbal. However, in so doing they were continuing an immemorial logical tradition. Moreover, these manuals keep the world in their sights, as we saw. The Cartesians do tend to collapse ‘things’ into ‘ideas’, rather than ‘ideas’ into ‘things’ (although they often subsume them under the traditional and confused ‘choses’).120 Descartes explains that we ‘use words, or put together other signs . . . in order to declare our thoughts to others’.121 In his Philosophical Discourse concerning Speech, conformable to Cartesian Principles (1668) Louis Ge´rauld de Cordemoy declares that ‘to speak is in general nothing else, but to give signes of our thoughts’.122 But to leave us in no doubt about Descartes’ simultaneous commitment to linguistic reference and to give us a taste of things to come – when the world really does fall away from language – let us look at a testy interchange between him and Hobbes over the ‘truth’ delivered by language. Hobbes objects that ‘the inferences in our reasoning tell us nothing at all about the nature of things, but merely tell us about the labels applied to them’.123 Descartes replies with uncontained derision that: when we reason, this is not a linking of names but of the things that are signified by the names, and I am surprised that the opposite view should occur to anyone . . . And surely on his account, when he concludes that the mind is a motion he might just as well conclude that the earth is sky, or anything else he likes.124

The Cartesians, in conjunction with their exceptionally explicit account of mentalism, had no qualms about the realist scope of their words – which brings me to my second point. Their language is ambitious, embracing the whole world and piercing its essence.

120

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123 124

for a criticism of Chomsky; Bracken (1984, pp. 113–23) and Hacking (1988) for ripostes to Aarsleff’s anti-Chomskianism. See Maclean (1999) for a comparison of Aristotelian and Cartesian mental language; Hacking (1975b, p. 33) on mental discourse as the language that mattered generally to philosophy in ‘the heyday of ideas’; Sorabji (1982) on the predominance of discursive thought in ancient theories of cognition. On the priority of thought over language and its connection to Cartesian dualism see Buroker 1997. Cottingham (1997) argues that ‘Descartes unequivocally advanced the claim that there is no thought without language’ (p. 30), which thereby undermines the notion of ‘Cartesian privacy’ (p. 32). Descartes 1964–74, xi , p. 4: ‘vous sc¸avez bien que les paroles, n’ayant aucune ressemblance avec les choses qu’elles signifient’. Descartes 1985c, p. 140. Cordemoy 1668, sig. A7v (following the second A4; verso side of British Library pagination p. 7). Locke had a version of this text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 116); cf. MS. Locke c. 25, fo. 26r where Cordemoy’s name appears in Locke’s journal index for 1677. Descartes 1984b, p. 125. Descartes 1984b, pp. 125; 126. For a reading of Hobbes’ and Descartes’ contrasting views on the relationship between language and consciousness see Ross 1988.

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The dominant view that language represents the world that we have seen promulgated by pedagogues and philosophers alike was undercut by a radically different story which had also been passed down the centuries, to be reinvented in the seventeenth century. According to this story, the meaning of words is determined less by external reference than by human, communal invention. There are two connected elements in this alternative approach to language. The first identifies linguistic origins in mutable and unscientific common usage. The second is rooted in a broadly defined scepticism and stresses the interpretative, subjective content of our referential words. The first differs from the realist programme in emphasis, rather than being theoretically incompatible with it, whereas the second threatens to jettison the world altogether from the language–mind–world equation. We have already met the first element in the conflict between grammarians. The battle lines were drawn between use and the world as the source of linguistic structure. The use-based proposal spills out of, as it doubtless spills into, a more general belief in the cultural contingency of language, loudly championed by renaissance humanists. In his attack on the ‘pseudodialecticians’ (1519), Vives argues that it is wrong ‘to use a selfinvented speech instead of that which other men use’. In his sights are the unintelligible liberties of the scholastics. ‘The people’ are the authors of language to whom grammar, dialectic and rhetoric should pay lip service.125 We remember Lamy bemoaning the irrevocably democratic ‘tyranny of custom’.126 Another facet of this theme is the stress on the deep arbitrariness of the relation between words and things. Conventionalism is by no means inconsistent with a realist view of language. Indeed, most realists sign up to this position. However, they tend not to dwell on it, whereas those writers who focus more on the human than the natural sphere highlight the sovereign role of human will in the creation of meaning. In A Discourse of the Knowledg of Beasts (1657), Marin Cureau de la Chambre explains that ‘speech is not a natural sign, but a sign of institution, which hath no signification but that which is imposed on it by the agreement and consent made amongst those which use it’. If speech is only the arbitrary association of certain words with certain things, then we can teach language to animals, as when we cojoin the sound ‘bread’ to the 125

Vives 1979, p. 55.

126

Lamy 1986, p. 207.

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thing we give to a hungry parrot.127 Hobbes voices the controversial opinion that language always was arbitrary; even Adam’s language did not naturally denote things. Ambivalent on the matter in Leviathan, Hobbes initially declares that ‘the first author of speech was God himself, that instructed Adam how to name such creatures as he presented to his sight’. However, he goes on to say that ‘the Scripture goeth no further in this matter’ and muses that God’s initial and limited authorisation ‘was sufficient to direct him to adde more names, as the experience and use of the creatures should give him occasion’.128 In De homine Hobbes wages an allout assault on the theory of Edenic speech. Even ‘the first man, by his own will imposed names on just a few animals’. ‘Speech could not have had a natural origin except by the will of man himself.’ Having reminded his readers of ‘the confusion of languages at Babel’, he ridicules as ‘childish’ those who say that ‘names have been imposed on single things according to the nature of those things. For who could have it so when the nature of things is everywhere the same while languages are diverse? And what relationship hath a call (that is, a sound) with an animal (that is, a body)?’129 Pufendorf repeats Hobbes’ cynicism about Adamic speech. Although one might find significant etymological roots in Adam’s words, those ‘primitives . . . signify merely at pleasure’. Pufendorf gives the following example: ‘though Adam gave this reason for the name Eve, Because she was the mother of all living; yet [that] the word Hava should import to live, is absolutely owing to imposition’.130 This repudiation of the possibility of natural language evokes an original and unbridgeable gap between language and the world. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Felton reiterates the Ovidian prospect of unstoppable linguistic mutation. ‘Languages, like our Bodies, are in a perpetual flux, and stand in need of recruits to supply the place of those words that are continually falling off thro’ disuse.’131 While linguistic conventionalism does not necessarily entail unrealistic language, it could intimate it. Sextus Empiricus goes so far as to make the link explicit in his influential Hypotyposes (translated into Latin by Henri Etienne in 1562).132 By contrast with cultural concepts, natural science is supposed to be ‘a thing that is firm and invariable’, being dependent on external existences and independent of our wills. However, because ‘the significance of names is based on convention and not on nature’, Sextus 127

128 131

Cureau de la Chambre 1657, pp. 266; 264–5. See Serjeantson (2001) on the signification of the passions in animal speech in early-modern philosophy. Hobbes 1996, p. 24. 129 Hobbes 1993, pp. 38; 39. 130 Pufendorf 1703, IV, p. 276. Felton 1971, p. 101. 132 Larmore 1998, p. 1145.

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asks rhetorically, ‘how would it be possible for a science capable of dividing a name into its significations to exist’? Logic cannot be ‘as some imagine, a ‘‘science of things which signify and are signified’’ ’.133 Sextus extends arbitrariness beyond the words and into their meanings. The content of words about the world is a matter of convention, not external reference. Sextus exemplifies language’s fluid foundation with Anaxagoras’ provocative proof that ‘snow is white’: ‘snow is frozen water, and water is black; therefore snow also is black’.134 According to this way of thinking about language, words seem cut adrift from any real foundation, yoked instead to the ephemeral (mis) understandings of human communities. It has been suggested that the humanists’ elevation of use indicates the ‘deontologisation’ of language, whereby meaning is determined by the relation of signs to each other, rather than by reference out of the system of signs, to the signified. But this is an anachronistic, Saussurean interpretation.135 In itself, the emphasis on use as the maker of meaning does not jeopardise the capacity of words to refer to the world, which, as we have seen in Aristotle and beyond, they can do perfectly arbitrarily. However, while there is no fundamental incongruity between usage and reference, the focus on the former at the expense of the latter is an alternative focus. And it paints an alternative portrait of language – one grounded more in its speakers than in the things it is supposed to represent. This is a picture that comes into sharp focus in the context of scepticism. This second element in the alternative view of language is not unconnected to the first, but is also bound up with the questioning, pro and con, rhetorical humanistic culture. By ‘scepticism’ I refer not only to the ripples of ancient theories that reached the sixteenth century, Academic as well as Pyrrhonian, but also (and often relatedly) to doubts about the fit between conventional (often Aristotelian) concepts–words and the world, and, more generally, to fears about human weakness and fallibility. It is crucial to note that this conglomeration of uncertainties nestles cheek by jowl with the self-assurance of new philosophical developments. As we have already begun to see, many of the new philosophers who raise questions about the imagination of man and about the correspondence between 133 135

Sextus 1976, p. 291. 134 Sextus 1976, p. 23. Waswo (1987) argues for a ‘relational’ semantics (p. 3) in the renaissance, a view he develops in Waswo 1999a, where he maintains that the meaning of a word was constituted by use (p. 29). See Monfasani (1989) for a critique of Waswo and an assertion of Valla’s (Waswo’s main example) ‘referential’ theory of meaning (p. 317); Maclean (1992, pp. 1–8) for balanced assessment of the issues.

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language and the world propose realist schemes of their own with as much conviction as they pull down the old ones. While ancient scepticism is certainly not the central and exclusive motor of philosophical change, new philosophers instead being concerned to discover and re-describe the world, these assertive re-descriptions are not incompatible with a spectrum of suspicions about the erring thinker/speaker. Indeed, they are bound tightly together. I turn first to the extreme end of the spectrum – to the barrier that sensation puts between language and the world. Sextus explains that the Pyrrhonist draws no connection between appearance and reality. He ‘announces his own impression in an undogmatic way, without making any positive assertion regarding the external realities’.136 The inconsistency of sense-impressions leads him to conclude that they cannot tell anything of what they represent. A jaundiced patient sees the world in yellow.137 If one presses one’s eyeball (apparently), things seem ‘oblong and narrow’.138 While the Pyrrhonist grants the fact of the appearance, he doubts its verisimilitude.139 He remains firmly at the phenomenal level, the visceral presence of which is beyond doubt, being the effect of ‘involuntary affections’.140 He shares the relativism of Protagoras, who had affirmed that ‘man is the measure of all things.’141 The question which haunts new philosophers and which Sextus answers negatively is whether the qualities we perceive in objects subsist in those objects. Divergent experience of things forces one to reject the claim that ‘nature made the senses commensurate with the objects of sense’.142 When the congruity between subject and object is shattered, so too is the congruity between language and things. While Sextus focuses on the epistemological problem rather than its linguistic consequences, he does, in addition to the concerns about linguistic conventionality, meditate on the opacity of logical definitions. Even ‘so familiar an object’ as a man can only be understood by direct experience, not by words. ‘If we propose to define absolutely all things, we shall define nothing, because of the regress ad infinitum.’143 Of themselves, words lead us no further than their sounds. Only experience can fill sounds with sense and this is forever separated from reality. Words about things can refer neither truly nor essentially to those things but merely record our 136

137 141

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Sextus 1976, p. 11. See Bailey (2002) on how the Pyrrhonist can live with his denial of any rationally justified belief. Sextus 1976, p. 29. 138 Sextus 1976, p. 19. 139 Sextus 1976, p. 15. 140 Sextus 1976, p. 17. Sextus 1976, p. 131. But the Pyrrhonist does not, like the Protagorean, assert dogmatically that ‘matter is in flux’ (Sextus 1976, p. 131). Sextus 1976, p. 59. 143 Sextus 1976, pp. 289; 285.

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unreliable and phenomenal perceptions of them. Moreover, the infinite particularity of things slips out of the grasp of abstract language. Far from mapping the world, our linguistic classification system, like our moral system, is the victim of contingent and changeable convention and experience. ‘There is a plague on man: his opinion that he knows something.’144 Montaigne reads Sextus with relish, declaring that, despite our claims to quintessential knowledge,145 we know no more than our treacherous senses tell us. They are ‘the beginning and the end of human knowledge’, but they ‘change and corrupt’, rather than represent, external objects.146 Their fluctuating information makes them unreliable sources. Montaigne repeats that what is seen by an eye now squeezed, now free, is different. What seemed like a straight oar seems crooked in the water.147 In the face of such permutation, sensations – our only guide to the world outside – cannot be trusted to resemble their origins. We are estranged from the world. ‘Nature is intended to exercise our ingenuity, like a painting veiled in mists and obscured by an infinite variety of wrong lights.’148 Montaigne depicts himself flailing in a sensuous maze from which he cannot escape. ‘We are going round in circles . . . We retreat into infinity. Our mental faculty of perception is never directly in touch with outside objects – which are perceived via the senses, and the senses do not embrace an outside object but only their own impressions of it.’149 We cannot directly perceive things. Our perception is active, interpretative. We cannot ‘receive anything without changing it’.150 ‘Things do not lodge in us with their forms and essence; they do not come in by the force of their own authority’, as is proved by our divergent reactions to things.151 We are in a sense the authors of things. Montaigne develops and innovates on the subject of language. Echoing the scepticism about linguistic–real classification and drawing on the old example of the monstrous birth that we met in Plato and that hounds subsequent philosophers, Montaigne asserts that ‘what we call monsters are not so’, but only genera ‘unknown to Man’.152 Our classifications of things elude their divine organisation. Like Sextus, Montaigne lampoons the

144 147 150 152

Montaigne 1991, p. 543. 145 Montaigne 1991, p. 588. 146 Montaigne 1991, pp. 663; 667. Montaigne 1991, pp. 675; 660. 148 Montaigne 1991, p. 602. 149 Montaigne 1991, p. 679. Montaigne 1991, p. 634. 151 Montaigne 1991, p. 633. Montaigne 1991, p. 808. See Cressy (2000, pp. 9–50) on early-modern responses to monstrous births. See Thomas (1983) on the changing perceptions of the natural world in the early-modern period that narrowed the perceived gap between men and animals.

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supposed real definitions of the dialecticians. He rejects as purely verbal and circular the ‘true’ propositions spun out of logical classifications: ‘A stone is a body.’ – But if you argue more closely: ‘And what is a body?’ – ‘Substance.’ – ‘And what is a substance?’ And so on; you will eventually corner your opponent on the last page of his lexicon. We change one word for another, often for one less known. I know what ‘man’ is better than I know what is animal, mortal or reasonable. In order to satisfy one doubt they give me three; it is a Hydra’s head.153

The rejection of the logicians’ world is not a marginal attack on a marginal language. It was in the logics that gentlemen learned the truth of things. In pulling the ground from logical language, critics pulled the ground from learned language about the world. For Montaigne, words are doomed to miss the mark of the world, but in disingenuous mouths they veer off more sharply, as in Anaxagoras’ proof that snow is black.154 Montaigne targets disputatious cunning for removing language an unnecessary distance from things. The fruit of arguing pro and contra ‘is the destruction and annihilation of the truth’.155 However, he is ambivalent about verbal juggling because he is also sympathetic to its exposure of the insecure foundations of our knowledge and speech. Although snow seems white, it may not be ‘truly so in essence’.156 While he disdains the aggressive and falsifying verbosity that moulds a gentleman, he also fears language and the world will be forever divorced. Pascal, Montaigne’s horrified but avid reader, draws on scepticism to strip reason of its authority. Alluding to the gulf between perception and reality, he says that ‘everything that cannot be understood does nevertheless not cease to exist’.157 His Port-Royal associate, Nicole, is also conscious of our myopia in his Essais de morale. In the words of Locke, his engrossed translator, he declares that ‘the sight of our minds and of our bodies are much alike: both superficial, both bounded. Our eyes pierce not into the inside of things: they stick at the surface.’ Moreover, ‘though our knowledge be very little, our certainty is yet less’.158 The epistemological scepticism of these two Frenchmen feeds off their Augustinian

153 156 157

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Montaigne 1991, p. 1213. 154 Sextus 1976, p. 23. 155 Montaigne 1991, p. 1048. Montaigne 1991, p. 676; cf. p. 561 on the merits of arguing on both sides about snow being black. Pascal 1995a, p. 79 (Pascal 1963, p. 530: ‘tout ce qui est incompre´hensible ne laisse pas d’eˆtre’). Locke owned two editions of the Pense´es (Nouvelle e´d. 1678 and Lyon 1675) (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 204). Nicole 1828, pp. 60; 61.

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desperation about the tight hold of original sin, and plunges us into the dancing, dappled shade of a platonic cave.159 There are two further French philosophers whose engagement with scepticism fuels and is fuelled by a sceptical attitude toward language. The first is Pierre Gassendi. A ‘mitigated sceptic’, he steers a middle course between scepticism and dogmatism in a way that proved popular in England, notably with Locke.160 Gassendi finds his particular footing, laid out in his Syntagma (1658), with Epicureanism. It leads him beyond ‘public knowledge’, or sensation, to ‘things hidden naturally or temporarily’, but not to ‘totally hidden things since our ignorance of them is invincible’.161 He takes sense perception as his certain starting point, those ‘appearances’ or ta phainomena that even Pyrrhonists accept, and takes them as signs from which inferences can be drawn about the truth that lies beneath them.162 In an empirico-rationalist narrative that echoes Aristotle and prefigures Locke, Gassendi explains how we can reason from sense experience.163 Words are essential in this tentative, intellectual bridge between appearance and reality. They signify the je ne sais quoi.164 They serve as ‘substitutes’ for those things that ‘cannot be brought into our presence or cannot appear before our eyes’.165 Words reach out to things beyond our sensory ken, enriching and furthering our understanding of things at the same time that they mark our experiential limits. Gassendi’s mitigated scepticism limits the scope of language, or rather, it causes him severely to curtail the excesses of his (Aristotelian) linguistic inheritance. He embarks on this demolition exercise in his earliest work, Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos (1624), a ground-clearing 159

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Parish (1999, p. 484) comments on the Jansenist characterisation of language as fallen discourse. Marshall (1994, p. xx) argues on the basis of Locke’s translation that he had not yet relinquished his belief in original sin. See Larmore (1998, p. 1158) on Gassendi’s engagement with scepticism more as a way of attacking Aristotelianism than as a response to the ‘ ‘‘sceptical crisis’’ at the beginning of the seventeenth century’, and on the Royal Society’s embracing of the hypothetical middle way. See James (1987) on the mitigated scepticism of Mersenne and Gassendi. Lennon (1993b) argues that Locke’s whole project should be seen as a contribution, under the overwhelming impact of Gassendi, towards the materialist giants in their battle against the idealist gods (Cartesians). Ayers (1997, p. 4) puts Locke in the empiricist tradition, particularly as articulated by Gassendi. Milton (2000c) argues for Gassendi’s small influence on Locke. Gassendi 1972b, pp. 326; 290. Gassendi 1972b, p. 329; cf. p. 333. These signs are divided into ‘empirical’, where the signified is ‘hidden temporarily’, such as smoke in the case of fire, and ‘indicative’, where the signified is always hidden but must exist for the sign to occur, such as sweat in the case of pores (p. 332). Gassendi 1972b, p. 333: ‘all knowledge which we have in the mind has its beginning in the senses’. See Osler (2000) on the tenacity of Aristotelian final causes in Gassendi’s natural philosophy. For a dazzling exploration of the je ne sais quoi in early-modern writing, see Scholar 2005. Gassendi 1972b, p. 329.

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piece for the erection of a viable epistemological (and linguistic) project. Caught up in youthful excitement about akatalepsia, he marvels at ‘how great a gulf divides the Spirit of Nature from the human mind’,166 and denies ‘that one can penetrate to the inner nature of things’.167 We cannot know ‘anything in Aristotelian fashion’.168 Gassendi asks rhetorically how Aristotle thinks the understanding can ‘peer into something’, when he himself admits that ‘there is nothing in the understanding that has not first been in the senses’.169 Our knowledge (and therefore our words) cannot extend beyond the information we derive from our senses. Gassendi despairs at the supposition of ‘souls’ in the world. ‘There are even some who think that stones and metals are alive.’ He digresses at painfully amusing length on what on earth the ‘form’ of a flea might mean.170 Having asked belligerently what is ‘the nature of a horse’s soul’, he seems to soften when he lands on ‘man’ whose ‘difference’, ‘at least’, we know: ‘rationality’. But there follows a torrent of abuse. Having laid bare our ignorance of the ‘differences’ of things, he rounds on the concept of ‘rationality’, drowning it in a sea of questions about what it means, all of which are unanswerable.171 The word ‘rational’ is perfectly obscure; its explication would take so long ‘that a full day will not be enough . . . and the light will fail you’. Definitions are not ‘clear and comprehensible’. He gives the example of ‘motion’, which scholastics helpfully elucidate as ‘the act of a being in potentiality insofar as it is in potentiality’. ‘Great god!’, snorts Gassendi, ‘is there any stomach strong enough to digest that?’ The words in the definition are all themselves in need of definition, ‘from which will follow the need for giving more definitions ad infinitum’.172 The verbal pillars of Aristotelianism crumble into powder, their essentialist scope an insignificant fantasy. The gap between words and things affects not only Aristotle’s dispensable ‘technical terms’ but also indispensable, everyday words. These fall into two types. The first are the qualities of things. Using the sceptical argument about divergent sense perception, Gassendi makes the standard new philosophical claim that qualities are not in things, but in us.173 166 168 169 171 173

Gassendi 1972a, p. 19. 167 Gassendi 1972a, p. 105. Gassendi 1972a, p. 104. Gassendi 1972a, p. 70. 170 Gassendi 1972a, pp. 41; 97–9. Gassendi 1972a, pp. 71; 72–3. 172 Gassendi 1972a, pp. 73; 74. Gassendi 1972a, pp. 91–3. He probes the supposedly private, mental nature of meaning by asserting that it is the public object which determines meaning, rather than the private sensation of that object (p. 92): ‘For even if snow appears red to me, I will still call it white since all men are in general agreement that the color of snow is to be called white; and although the rose may seem white to me, I will still call it red since this rosy color is generally called red . . . it is necessary that

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They are relative, not referential, images. The second type of problematic ordinary words are universals.174 These are not misleading if understood for what they are (purely conceptual or linguistic classifications) but they are shot through with the scholastic misconception that they pick out real categories of things. Gassendi declares that ‘these great universals are nothing more than what the grammarians call common nouns, or ones that can be applied to more than one object, for example ‘‘man’’ or ‘‘horse’’ ’.175 Every thing in the world is ‘unique’, only thoughts and names are universal.176 Conceptual and linguistic unity is derived from ‘similarity’ between particulars.177 For example, the mind forms the ‘universal concept of a man from having seen Plato, Socrates, and others, and has named them both with the same universal noun because of the properties they share’.178 The mind generalises from particulars ‘either by joining or by separating’.179 Although his own Logica appears to accept our convenient classes of things, in his Exercitationes Gassendi tears up the map of the world which allots things to their specific squares. He uses the familiar example of ‘monster’ to expose the unnaturalness of the lines. His is ‘that little one-legged girl whom we saw not so long ago in our Provence’ and who makes a mockery of universal statements like ‘every man is a biped’.180 These supposedly eternal ‘first truths’, the bedrock of true ratiocination, are really contingent and liable to dissolve with contradictory instances. Gassendi depicts nature as slipping out of any inflexible classifications, the most rigid ones of which are the ten categories. ‘You must realize, my good man, that things themselves are not contained by the categories, but only the concepts and names of things.’181 Gassendi pans out from the particularly absurd and ragged straitjacket of the categories to linguistic–conceptual taxonomies in general, and announces their inevitable disjunction from things. Gassendi is keen to qualify his nominalism with the assurance that universal words do, albeit in an abstracted sense, refer to particular things. His nominalist break between concepts–words and things does not entail ‘no reality beneath concepts or words’.182 Linguistic reference is

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the term by which a certain thing is designated in a society be absolutely fixed even if it is possible that various appearances are represented by the single term’. Locke repeats this claim at Locke 1975, p. 389 (ii.xxxii.15). For a discussion of this apparent contradiction in Locke’s linguistic theory see footnote 55, p. 221, chapter 8 below. See Milton (2000b) on the continuing centrality of the nominalist/realist divide in seventeenthcentury philosophy. Gassendi 1972a, pp. 42–3. 176 Gassendi 1972b, p. 43. 177 Gassendi 1972b, p. 44. Gassendi 1972b, p. 46. 179 Gassendi 1981, p. 86. 180 Gassendi 1972a, p. 78. Gassendi 1972a, p. 57. 182 Gassendi 1972a, p. 46.

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underpinned by a causal link between images and things themselves. An image is ‘true’ when ‘the idea of the thing which we imagine conforms to the thing itself ’. This might be the case with a four-footed, running horse, but not with a winged, flying one.183 In his Logica he even goes so far as to preserve conceptual simplicity for substantives, such as ‘man’. In line with an unbroken logical tradition, ‘ ‘‘man’’ is simply conceived without affirmation or denial’.184 While this commonplace may not be representative of his more authentic views, Gassendi certainly has some optimism about verbal reference – an optimism that reverberates in his assertion that the world is made of atoms at the same time that he denies substantial forms. Words may map the superficies of things (and even scratch the surface through reason) in an interpretative rather than an absolute sense, but they hold them truly and wholly, albeit loosely, all the same. Malebranche, the second French philosopher whose encounter with scepticism and the new philosophy causes him to reflect cynically on language, is of a more rationalist ilk. He too uses the sceptical grounds of multifarious sense perception to dispute the Aristotelian inherence of sensible qualities in things. ‘Salt that is savoury to the tongue is pricking and smarting to a wound.’ Names of qualities are ‘equivocal’ because they ‘confound the modes of existence peculiar to bodies, with the modifications of the soul’. For example, ‘when they say that fire is hot, grass green, sugar sweet, they understand . . . that fire contains in it what they feel when they warm themselves; that grass has painted upon it the colours they see; that sugar is endued with that sweetness they taste when they eat it’. This linguistic misunderstanding is embedded in the speech of ‘children, and the vulgar of men’.185 It is an intuitive error that is propagated rather than purged by language – language that does not tell it like it is, but only compounds, and even creates, our delusions about the world. In English philosophy too, epistemological and linguistic scepticism run together, generating and inflaming each other. While Bacon believes in the possibility of the primordial threesome of words, notions and things, he is haunted by the idols that menace the marriage. The most ingrained of these, the ‘idols of the tribe’, concern the perceptual relationship between the mind and the world at a level where one might imagine that nothing could go awry. But in fact, perceptions ‘are 183 184 185

Gassendi 1981, p. 84. Gassendi 1981, p. 83. See Kraye (1999) on the stylistic effects of Epicureanism. Malebranche 1694, ii.vi, p. 55.

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reflections of man, not of the universe’. We project our desires and visions on to things, instead of receiving them straight. ‘The human understanding is like an uneven mirror that cannot reflect truly the rays from objects, but distorts and corrupts the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.’186 The ‘enchanted glass’ of the mind does not duplicate things, but infuses them with its own self-gratificatory fantasies.187 This subjectivist, interpretative, creative account of the human understanding is further infected by the ‘idols of the marketplace’ – words that do not reflect things, but paint an unreal picture. Bacon is obsessed by the way that language, particularly syllogistic language, affords ‘no passage to Nature’.188 Born in the commerce of the common man, words are ‘wrongly’ and ‘inappropriately’ applied. They therefore ‘do violence to the understanding and throw everything into confusion’.189 There are two types of idolatrous word. The first are ‘names of things that do not exist’ or ‘names without [corresponding] things’, like ‘prime mover’, ‘planetary orbs’, ‘the element of fire’. While these can simply be rejected, the second type is ‘obscure and deep-seated’ because it concerns everyday and indispensable words whose foundations we do not question. They are names of qualities like ‘moist’ – ‘which do exist but are muddled and vague, and hastily and unjustly derived from things’.190 These misleading words are ‘inseparable from our nature and condition of life’.191 They cannot be eradicated, only watched and circumnavigated, which suggests the profound intractability of the problem. The meaning of words is determined by incorrect notions. At the same time, the misleading words force themselves upon our minds, a problem Bacon grapples with in his explanation of how syllogistic logic allows ‘nature to slip from its grasp’.192 The syllogism consists of propositions, propositions of words, and words are tokens and symbols of notions. If therefore the very notions of the mind (which are, as it were, the soul of words, and the basis of the whole system and structure) are badly and carelessly derived from things, and vague, inadequately defined and circumscribed, in short, if they are defective in many ways, then everything collapses.193 186

187 188

189 192 193

Bacon 1994b, p. 54; Solomon (1991) gives an unusual interpretation of the way in which Baconian scientists are readers of nature. Wood (1991) argues that Locke was greatly influenced by Bacon. Bacon 1996b, p. 227. Bacon 1994a, pp. 19; 20. Cf. Bacon 1994b, p. 69: ‘in Aristotle’s Physics, you hear little but the words of dialectic; and in his Metaphysics too, under a more imposing name’. Bacon 1994b, p. 55. 190 Bacon 1994b, pp. 64–5. 191 Bacon 1996b, p. 228. Bacon 1994a, p. 19. Bacon 1994a, p. 20; cf. Bacon 1994b, p. 46: ‘the syllogism consists of propositions, propositions of words, and words are tokens of notions. Therefore – and this is the heart of the matter – if the

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Given the dependence of language on its epistemological base, words are only as true as the thoughts they represent. Although it is obvious that thoughts mean everything to language, philosophers rarely refer to the inextricability of thoughts and words, tending to think of them as easily separable. Bacon’s deep insertion of language into epistemology and vice versa is a key moment. We have to wait for Locke to unravel the devastating consequences of this interdependence. But it would be wrong to leave Bacon in such a cynical mood. His promulgation of the epistemological–linguistic problem is part of its exorcism, even if he indicates that it can never be entirely obliterated. He resolutely repudiates the sceptic who throws up his hands in doubt and indifference and preaches ‘Acatalepsy’. He stresses ‘again and again, that the human senses and understanding, for all their weaknesses, must not have their authority disparaged, but should rather be supported’.194 And as we have seen, he thinks it is possible to write out experience in such a way that the gap between words and things is snapped shut. The new mechanists have come a long way from Bacon, opening up that gap between words and things, with thoughts which bear little relation to those things. Kenelm Digby typifies the transformation that the way of ideas causes in linguistic theory. Having warned us in his Two Treatises (1644) that it is ‘most dangerous’ when people ‘confound the true and reall natures of things, with the conceptions they frame of them in their own mind’, he lays out the implications for language in a way that confirms his Aristotelian heritage while treading a road to Locke: It is true words serve to express things; but if you observe the matter well, you will perceive they do so, onely according to the pictures we make of them in our own thoughts, and not according as the things are in their proper natures. Which is very reasonable it should be so, since the soul, that giveth the names, hath nothing of the things in her but these notions; and therefore cannot give other names but such as must signifie the things by mediation of these notions.195

Digby’s account of the ineliminable and unrealistic mediation of notions is superseded, however, by his ambitious account of knowledge. ‘Thus we see knowledge hath no limits; nothing escaping the toyles of science; all that ever was, that is, or can ever be, is by them circled in . . . in what an immense ocean one may securely saile, by that never varying compasse’.196 While words might immediately and necessarily signify only

194

notions themselves are muddled and carelessly derived from things, the whole superstructure is shaky’. Bacon 1994b, pp. 76; 77. 195 Digby 1645, p. 2. 196 Digby 1645, p. 31.

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notions, Digby does not approach Locke’s ‘vast ocean of being’ where one ‘can find no sure footing’.197 Robert Boyle goes a lot further in probing the interpretative, creative character of the mind’s understanding of things, in a way that will deeply impress Locke. However, he gives a confident, probable ‘hypothesis’ of what the world is at base, or in essentia.198 It is made of catholic matter or, to use his coinage, ‘insensible corpuscles’ organised by motion and their interaction.199 He lays out this world-view in The Origin of Forms and Qualities (1666), an expropriation of the Aristotelian world-view. ‘Forms’ are redescribed as ‘essential modifications’ of matter, that is, size, shape, motion and ‘texture’ (the spatial arrangement of the corpuscles).200 These ‘primary qualities’ are in a sense the ‘real essences’ of things. We cannot know them through our senses, but we can name them ex hypothesi. However, while Boyle gives an essentialist, albeit probable, account of our knowledge (and naming) of the imperceptible world, he gives a sceptical one of our knowledge (and naming) of the perceptible world. First, he dismisses beliefs that gain credence merely because they have words to represent them. They are ‘grounded on such technical terms or forms of speaking that suppose the truth of such opinions’. But phrases such as ‘four elements’ or ‘substantial forms’ have no grounding ‘in rerum natura’.201 Aristotelian definitions seem to be an emblem of the void at the heart of the philosophical system out of which they are spun. ‘Quality is that by which a thing is said to be qualis.’ This definition consumes itself, unable to escape the verbal circle. The problem of definitional tautology is not restricted to Aristotelian nonsense but affects language in general. Words such as ‘saltness, sourness, green, blue’ cannot be understood through a definition, but only by experience.202 It is not just that language does not, but that it cannot, take us to the world. Boyle reveals a rift between language–perception and the world. Familiarly, he focuses on sensible qualities as the locus of this disjunction. Like Locke’s other friend and mentor, the observational doctor Sydenham, Boyle explains that the senses tell us nearly everything we know about bodies but that, unfortunately, their missives are more imaginative than

197 198 199 200

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Locke 1975, p. 47 (i.i.7). See McMullin (1990) on Boyle’s and others’ reconceptualisations of the quality of knowledge. Boyle 1979a, p. 69. Boyle 1979a, pp. 69; 71. Locke owned The Origins of Forms and Qualities According to the Corpuscular Philosophy (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 91). See Golinski 1990b. Boyle 1979a, pp. 5; 6. 202 Boyle 1979a, pp. 29; 30.

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real.203 We perceive and name ‘qualities’ as though they subsisted in the things themselves, whereas in fact they are produced by our sense organs. Ideas of things are caused by the ‘relation that happens to be betwixt those primary accidents of the sensible object and the peculiar texture of the organ it affects’.204 Primary qualities in the bodies themselves effect radically different secondary qualities in us. The world is therefore fundamentally not as we see and name it. The problem is that we suppose the contrary. ‘We have been from our infancy apt to imagine that these sensible qualities are real beings in the objects they denominate.’ But there is nothing ‘real’ in the bodies except their corpuscular arrangement.205 The Aristotelians speak as though there were ‘real qualities’, such as ‘whiteness’ (the ‘simple natures’ that Bacon pursues).206 Boyle exemplifies the subjective status of qualities with a pin that causes us pain when it pricks. ‘There is no distinct quality in the pin answerable to what I am apt to fancy pain to be.’ If there were no eyes, there would be no colours.207 Another vivid example is of the sun, whose powers ‘harden clay, and soften wax, and melt butter, and thaw ice . . . ’ yet are none of them present in the sun, which consists only of ‘the brisk and confused local motion of the minute parts of a body’.208 The world as we experience it is more fabrication than real. We should not project it back out to nature. Nor do substances escape Boyle’s contingent identification. They are classified according to ‘convenience’ rather than any transcendental map. Following Bacon and presaging Locke, a ‘species’ is only a particular conglomeration of secondary qualities. He picks up a perennially fascinating example: gold. All that we understand by this word is the ‘aggregate or convention of qualities’ we observe, for example, ‘very malleable and ductile, fusible and yet fixed in the fire, and of a yellowish colour’. To further distinguish it, say from brass, we add that it is ‘indissoluble in aqua fortis’. None of these qualities are ‘essential’ to a body.209 All of them are accidental and subject to change, as, for example, in the case of ‘white gold’, or rotting fruit.210 These variations do not indicate the destruction of substantial forms but only an amendment of the underlying material properties. ‘A pear grafted upon a thorn . . . will bear good fruit’.211 The ‘tacit agreement’ of men carves up the world into 203

204 207 210

Sydenham 1696, sig. a5v: ‘it is plainly impossible that physicians should understand those causes of diseases which have no manner of commerce with the senses’. Sydenham’s symptomatic, superficial approach to bodies must have influenced Locke. Harrison and Laslett (1965, p. 242) list eight works of Sydenham’s which Locke possessed, including two editions of Opera universa. Boyle 1979a, p. 13. 205 Boyle 1979a, p. 31. 206 Boyle 1979a, pp. 15–16. Boyle 1979a, p. 31. 208 Boyle 1979a, p. 27. 209 Boyle 1979a, pp. 38; 39. Boyle 1979a, pp. 39; 52. 211 Boyle 1979a, p. 66.

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‘species’.212 They agree what ‘concurrence of all those qualities’ are ‘necessary and sufficient’ to denominate the body.213 Our classifications cannot capture the infinite variety of things. Following Lucretius, Boyle thinks of the multiplicity of words that can be made out of twenty-four letters and considers what untold myriad of corpuscular arrangements there must be which deserve, but lack, ‘distinct appellations’. Things are named for pragmatic rather than truly encyclopaedic purposes. So, we differentiate between a ‘gold ring’ and a ‘wedge of gold’.214 There are no known diagnostic criteria for ‘discriminating and limiting the species of things’. Names tend to be taken for things, but really they indicate our own interests and perceptions. Boyle warns us that specific distinctions are ‘more arbitrary than we are wont to be aware of ’.215 But we are not making it up entirely. These conglomerations of qualities are caused by particular arrangements of primary qualities which Boyle calls ‘essential forms’. Boyle’s words do, in the way that (according to Boyle) Aristotle’s absolutely do not, follow things, albeit in a very free translation.216 I have left Hobbes to the end because he stands at perhaps the furthest extreme of this debate. At first glance, he looks like other new philosophers, declaring that words signify thoughts that in turn are caused, in a link of non-resemblance, by things.217 However, there are three ways in which Hobbes cuts away at the thread that joins words, thoughts and things. The first and fundamental step he takes in removing speech from the world is his bold and bald assertion that words signify conceptions, not things. We heard this war cry in chapter 1. He responds to the scholastic debate about whether words signify thoughts or things with the apparent fact that when one speaks or hears the word ‘stone’ one can only form a thought of a stone. A real stone does not enter one’s head, as we saw Sergeant suggest.218 While he has the scholastics squarely in his sights, Hobbes also targets his lazy contemporaries, who call with careless abandon for the congruence of words and things. The second way Hobbes drains words of their conventional plenitude is by threatening to dissolve the link – and make imperceptible the line – between the mind and the world. He presents an exceptionally 212 213 216 217

218

Boyle 1979a, p. 45. Boyle 1979a, p. 52. 214 Boyle 1979a, p. 49. 215 Boyle 1979a, pp. 72; 71–2. Boyle 1979a, p. 62; see p. 58 on Aristotelianism respecting ‘rather words than things’. Hobbes 1996, pp. 13–14. See Leijenhorst (2002a, p. 221) on Hobbes’ retention of realism insofar as ideas are ‘causally dependent on external bodies which act on us by means of local motion’. Hobbes 1981, p. 15. See Leijenhorst (2002b) for the way in which Hobbes’ theory of language is indebted to, as well as a revision of, late Aristotelianism. For a Wittgensteinian reading of Hobbes’ linguistic theory, see Heinrichs 1973.

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subjective, sceptical account of our imaginative encounter with the world. Recalling Protagoras’ dictum, he declares that ‘men measure, not onely other men, but all other things, by themselves’.219 He goes beyond the familiar contemporary assertion that the qualities we perceive in things do not inhere in them, but in us.220 His style, as well as his arguments, shroud us from the world behind a particularly thick veil of obscure and uncertain ideas. Experience is like a dream, disorientating and uncertain. Having asserted the unreality of our sense experience, he concludes that ‘whatsoever accidents or qualities our senses make us think there be in the world, they are not there, but are seemings and apparitions only’. The reader is placed in a peculiar state of dislocation, subject to ‘the great deception of sense’.221 When objects are gone, their ‘phantasies’ remain, which we compound to create ‘fictions of the mind’.222 When we sleep we dream in images which ‘are not obscure, but strong and clear, as in sense itself ’.223 Indeed, ‘a dreame must needs be more cleare, in this silence of sense, than are our waking thoughts . . . And because waking I often observe the absurdity of dreames, but never dream of the absurdities of my waking thoughts; I am well satisfied, that being awake, I know I dreame not; though when I dreame, I think my selfe awake.’224 Hobbes’ point is driven home by his wordplay and the reader is unsettled, the line between fiction and reality eroded in the disconcerting poetry. He reaches a crescendo in his story about the ‘difficult[y of] discerning of a mans dream, from his waking thoughts’, when he introduces ‘visions’.225 These waking dreams are often induced by fear of ‘fayries’, and spun in our minds by ‘crafty ambitious persons’. They enthral ‘the simple people’ and threaten civil obedience.226 Hobbes turns his sharp pen on these fantastic religious insinuations in the final part of Leviathan, explaining away the presence of demons by appealing to the excessive operations of the imagination. ‘It was hard for men to conceive of those Images in the Fancy, and in the sense, otherwise, than of things really without us.’227 The final and most distinctive way that Hobbes muddies the linguistic waters is his severance of language from the mind, as well as from things. He rejects the view that language is a perfect reflection of thought. According to him, the understanding is filled with particular and unique 219 222 225 227

Hobbes 1996, p. 15. 220 E.g. Hobbes 1969, p. 6; 1996, p. 14. 221 Hobbes 1969, pp. 7; 8. Hobbes 1996, p. 16. 223 Hobbes 1969, p. 8. 224 Hobbes 1996, p. 17. Hobbes 1996, p. 18. 226 Hobbes 1996, p. 19. Hobbes 1996, p. 440. Flathman (1993) and Tuck (1988a) paint variously sceptical portraits of Hobbes, in contrast to Sorell (1993b) and Skinner (1996, p. 9).

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images, just as the world is filled with particular and unclassified things. Only words are universal. ‘There being nothing in the world universall but names; for the things named, are every one of them individuall and singular.’ A general term does not signify a general or abstract idea. There are no such things. Instead, a general term covers a host of particular ideas of things on the basis of ‘similitude in some quality’.228 When we speak or hear a general term, we bring to mind one particular. When Hobbes declares, sounding very familiar, that ‘the generall use of speech, is to transferre our mental discourse, into verbal’, he is not being strictly frank.229 The process is not, as it is for his contemporaries, one of pure translation, but one of radical development. Language is of a very different character from thoughts. From the mind’s point of view, as well as the world’s, it does not ring true. Hobbes exemplifies the necessary arbitrariness of our linguistic classification with the now familiar example of the monstrous birth. The absence of natural right reason determines the need for an ‘arbitrator’, the sovereign, to decide the content of natural terms: ‘Upon the occasion of some strange and deformed birth, it shall not be decided by Aristotle, or the philosophers, whether the same be a man or no, but by the laws’.230 Although it may not have been Hobbes’ intention, he was perceived as ripping language apart from things.231 He shocked his contemporaries with the claim that ‘true and false are attributes of speech, not of things’.232 This is because truth, like reason or science, concludes universally, and so can only deal in names, not thoughts and things, which can only ever be particular. The Port-Royal Logique echoes Descartes’ outrage about this assertion.233 We remember that Hobbes objected to Descartes that reasoning concerns names not things. ‘All we can infer’, he elaborates, ‘is whether or not we are combining the names of things in accordance with the arbitrary conventions which we have laid down in respect of their meaning’.234 Half-purposefully, half-provocatively, Hobbes strands the human speaker a long way from the world, unable to arrive, imaginatively and creatively drawing his own conclusions.

228 231 232 234

Hobbes 1996, p. 26. 229 Hobbes 1996, p. 25. 230 Hobbes 1969, p. 189. On the need for ‘evidence’ in language see Hobbes 1969, p. 25. Hobbes 1996, p. 27. 233 Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 27; Descartes 1984b, p. 126. Hobbes 1996, p. 126.

c h ap t e r 5

Semantic instability: a containable threat

The confident assumption of semantic universality is implicit in earlymodern linguistic theory. Though philosophers rarely spell it out, it is this that grounds their system of communication. They take it for granted that there is one set of meanings that underlies all languages and that, as a result, people can mean the same things and communicate with each other. Semantic uniformity is inferred from the uniformity of human understanding and the unity of the world.1 Philosophers take their cue from that seminal passage in De interpretatione where Aristotle declares that although languages diverge, the thoughts and, in turn, the objects they signify ‘are the same for the whole of mankind’.2 In his commentary on this passage, Aquinas reminds us of the reason why this is so: ‘simple conceptions of the intellect’, such as the essence of ‘man’ (while they have been actively abstracted by men) have not been ‘composed’ or ‘divided’, are incapable of truth or falsity, and therefore ‘must be the same in all’.3 The impression of a common semantic discourse is entrenched by the grammarians and logicians who talk unconcernedly about that res which convention has assigned to a certain verbum. A meaning is treated as though it were one unproblematic, discrete object – indeed, we have seen how this characterisation teeters on the brink between figural and real. The elision of the difference between thought and thing only serves to deepen the coincident impression that a meaning is a determinate, public entity upon which people agree to impose a word. However, the examination of the trivium revealed various points where semantic universality comes under pressure, either because concerns are raised internally, or because certain junctures appear vulnerable when 1

2

See Dawson (2003) on the various ways in which a common mental discourse was presented and defended. Aristotle 1938b, p. 115. 3 Aquinas 1998, p. 463.

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subjected to external scrutiny, or, indeed, because writers, particularly rhetoricians, actually celebrate semantic abundance. While the strong current of the logico-grammatical tradition pushes forward a faith in a universal semantic discourse, we have encountered some eddies that run in a contrary direction. Knowledge of ambiguous words and their use in fallacious arguments had always been central to a gentleman’s training. But the logical problem of ambiguity is neatly circumscribed and not considered to drain into language as a whole, except, as we saw, by the Port-Royal Logique that considers, albeit marginally, wide-ranging temporal and cultural semantic relativism. A serious theoretical threat also comes from those grammarians who postulate that languages are neither inter-translatable, nor underpinned by one deep structure. Developing the humanist commitment to language as contingent usage and Bacon’s interest in a culturally relative semantics, historicist grammarians claim that language is not rooted in reason and the world, but in diverse and mutating human contexts, thereby jeopardising its univocity. Rhetoric further diffracts language – particularly moral language – which is to be the major location of philosophical anxiety about semantic instability. Rhetoricians present words as loosely attached to meaning, to be applied variously and wilfully. It is an exhibition of professional aplomb, in the use of figures, to wrench words from their proper places. Moreover, in tropical speech it is up to the audience to make up meaning. Informing all three arts is the fundamental disunity between sign and signified; they are joined in a purely arbitrary, and therefore potentially unstable, way. Picking up these already unravelling threads, early-modern philosophers begin to undo the story of semantic universalism. Broadly speaking, they articulate two types of concern. The first is that people agree on the meaning of a word, but disagree as to how it ought to be applied to the world, as when forensic orators argue about whether an action is ‘murder’, or if it is ‘liberal’ or ‘extravagant’. The second and more profound way in which words are thought to become equivocal is when people disagree about the meaning or definition of the word itself, as may be the case with ‘freedom’ or ‘God’.4 However, writers do not consistently hold these two concerns apart – in accordance with their habit of coagulating concept and thing. Again, therefore, I subsume what we would now distinguish as meaning and reference under the overarching title of ‘meaning’, and call the whole issue one of ‘semantic’ instability, 4

See Skinner (2002a, pp. 161–2) on this distinction.

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although we ought to remember that this includes divergent applications, as well as divergent definitions, of terms. I ought also to stress that the polysemic potential of words was not necessarily a cause of concern. This is, in part, because there might be said to be two distinct and opposing aspects of polysemy. There is, on the one hand, the manageable and even marvellous semantic cornucopia of poets, rhetoricians and speakers at large, which positively enhances understanding and intersubjectivity. On the other, there is uncontrollable, undetected, and often unintentional semantic instability which entrenches and engenders misunderstanding and isolation. Many who worry about the second, negative aspect do not necessarily perceive any distinction between the two and attack rhetoricians for the dim effects of playing with words. While it is in the main the downbeat voices that I shall educe, some of them, such as Pufendorf ’s, are at times neutral, even encouraging, about the fact that words might mean many things. They indicate the other, optimistic side of the argument about the merits of semantic multiplicity – a side which arguably increasingly lost (explicit) favour in the seventeenth century. With the exception of the poetic fraternity, who taxonomise semantic plurality and maintain that it increases communication, the issue is not addressed or questioned systematically until Locke, who argues that, on the contrary, miscommunication ensues. Due to the overwhelming and often unconscious subscription to basic semantic universality, reservations about it only emerge sporadically in texts, whose disparate authors therefore generate the structure of the present chapter. scepticism and montaigne The rediscovery of ancient scepticism is important not only for provoking the perception of grave disjunctions between words and the world, but also for questioning the capacity of words to signify univocally. Sextus Empiricus had put his finger on a powerful reason why a particular class of meanings might diverge. As opposed to ‘natural objects’, ‘conventional objects have no existence’, and are therefore ‘easily liable to change and variation’.5 In the same way that Locke will account for the diversity of mixed modes, Sextus explains that it is because they ‘depend upon ourselves’ that conventional objects alter and deviate. It is because we make them up that non-natural ideas multiply between people. 5

Sextus 1976, p. 291.

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Montaigne takes up the commanding fact of cultural diversity, and thereby evokes the possibility of semantic diversity, especially with evaluative terms. Moral words are exposed as blowing in the wind of custom. ‘Nothing in all the world has greater variety than law and custom. What is abominable in one place is laudable somewhere else.’ He mentions infanticide and polygamy as instances of acceptable customs. Evaluative consensus is also lacking in the attribution of ‘beauty’: ‘for a painter in the Indies beauty is black and sunburnt, with thick swollen lips and broad flat noses . . . In Peru, big ears are beautiful.’6 The perceptible world does not contain its aesthetic and ethical status within it, but is vulnerable to endless redescription. Unfortunately, semantic dissolution does not stop within the same culture, but creeps there too by virtue of disagreement between compatriots. Rather than interpreting the fall of Babel as indicative simply of verbal diversity, Montaigne interprets it as signifying ‘the infinite, endless altercation over discordant opinions and arguments which accompanies the vain structures of human knowledge, enmeshing them in confusion.’7 Semantic flexibility is further assured by the fluidity of language itself – the exemplary creature, or victim, of custom. ‘It goes flowing through our fingers every day, and during my lifetime half of it has changed. We say that it is perfect now: each age says that of its own. I do not think it has reached perfection while it is still running away and changing form.’8 There is another, more innovative and radical way in which Montaigne lays waste the claim that words are windows with one view. He places meaning in the hands of the audience, and so proffers endless semantic proliferation.9 Once words leave the speaker he is no longer in control of their content; they become free-floating signs for others to tie down as they desire. In his Apologie de Raimond Sebond Montaigne presents texts as blank tablets on which readers can write whatever they please. He muses on the common experience ‘that once you start digging down into a piece of writing there is simply no slant or meaning – straight, bitter, sweet or bent – which the human mind cannot find there’. He exemplifies his claim with reference to biblical hermeneutics, that promiscuous field where interpreters do not translate, but generate, meaning. ‘Take that clearest, purest and most perfect Word there can ever be: how much 6 9

Montaigne 1991, pp. 654–5; 537. 7 Montaigne 1991, p. 623. 8 Montaigne 1991, p. 1111. See Cave (1979) for a suggestive interpretation of the generative and devious characterisation of language in the French renaissance; Ronberg (1992) on the inconstancy of verbal meaning in English renaissance literature; McCanles (1990) on the free play of the signifier in Bacon; Fish (1971b and 1972) on the ‘self-consuming’ language of seventeenth-century literature.

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falsehood and error have men made it give birth to! Is there any heresy which has not discovered ample evidence for its foundation and continuance?’ Despite his striking depiction of semantic indeterminacy, he does imply that there is one proper reading. It is the ‘founders of . . . erroneous doctrines’ who misunderstand God’s word, and take refuge in the one and only form of ‘proof’ available to them: ‘evidence based upon exegesis of words’.10 Divergent exposition seems here to be a possible result of ill will, not an inevitability. However, Montaigne’s return to the subject in De l’expe´rience renews his assault on the naı¨ve appeal to ‘the express words of the Bible’. They ‘cannot be serious’, he says of those who think they can end religious quarrels with recourse to Scripture. The reader is no less a productive agent than the writer. ‘Our minds do not find the field any less vast when examining the meanings of others than when formulating our own.’ The same goes for law. ‘There is as much scope and freedom in interpreting laws as in making them.’11 ‘All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth.’12 Not content with discrepancies between individuals, Montaigne bores his dissecting gaze into individuals themselves. He opens up our mercurial nature in a way that leaves its mark on his successors and shakes the early-modern presumption of semantic stability to near lifelessness. ‘Never did two men ever judge identically about anything’, declares Montaigne, ‘and it is impossible to find two opinions which are exactly alike, not only in different men but in the same man at different times’.13 The linguistic ramifications are almost audible: given that one says what one thinks, semantic divergence will be equivalent to mental divergence. Moreover, the meaning of my words will not only differ from my fellows’, but also in me from moment to moment. This personal miscellany looms large in the context of Montaigne’s shattered ‘self ’, whose shards appear in his self-confessed act of literary self-constitution – ‘for it is my 10 11

12 13

Montaigne 1991, p. 661. Cf. Eden 1997; Jeanneret 1999. Montaigne 1991, p. 1208. In a somewhat inscrutable passage, Montaigne refers to the active participation of the audience in speech. ‘Words belong half to the speaker, half to the hearer. The latter must prepare himself to receive them according to such motion as they acquire, just as among those who play royal-tennis the one who receives the ball steps backwards or prepares himself, depending on the movements of the server or the form of his stroke’ (p. 1235). The comparison with tennis dashes the traditionally passive characterisation of the reader, and substitutes an energetic, constructive and indispensable player. Cf. Bauschatz 1980; Cave 1982; O’Neill 1982. Montaigne 1991, p. 1212. Montaigne 1991, p. 1210 (1962, p. 1044: ‘jamais deux hommes ne jugerent pareillement de mesme chose, et est impossible de voir deux opinions semblables exactement, non seulement en divers hommes, mais en mesme homme a` diverses heures’.)

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own self that I am painting’ – in his broken and borrowed attempts. ‘I cannot remain fixed within my disposition and endowments.’14 He quotes Plutarch approvingly: ‘I am not the same person when I am well: being different, my opinions and ideas are different too.’15 Du repentir begins in a flood of self-dissolution. ‘I am unable to stabilize my subject . . . I grasp it as it is now, at this moment when I am lingering over it. I am not portraying being but becoming: not the passage from one age to another . . . but from day to day, from minute to minute. I must adapt this account of myself to the passing hour’. The only truth, the only closure accessible to this sceptic is ‘Michel de Montaigne’, but it eludes him.16 If a man’s centre cannot hold then neither can his words; meaning slips out in all directions. ‘the argument is about words, not things’ Most seventeenth-century philosophers do not approach Montaigne’s extreme scepticism about mental uniformity, but instead bear witness to the generic ‘thoughts’ or res we encountered in the trivium. Semantic universality is so axiomatic that it regularly forms a self-evident premise for an argument. For example, Hobbes uses it to prove the arbitrary connection between res and verba: given semantic universality, linguistic universality would follow if there were natural connections between words and meanings.17 The universal language movement, a principal goal of which is, as Lodwick puts it, a ‘common writing’, is predicated on the belief in a universal human mind (and world).18 Babel might be repaired or as Bacon, the father of the movement, hopes, ‘the curse of the confusion of tongues’ might be lifted, precisely because underneath the mess of 14 16

17

18

Montaigne 1991, pp. lix; 39. 15 Montaigne 1991, pp. 635–6. Montaigne 1991, pp. 907–8. Cf. p. 634: ‘How our judgements vary! How frequently we change our ideas! What I hold and believe today, I hold and believe with the totality of my belief. All my faculties, all my resources hold tight to that opinion and vouch for it with all their might. It would be impossible to me to embrace and maintain any truth more strongly. I am wholly for it, truly for it. But – not once, not a hundred times, but every day – have I not embraced something else with the same resources and under the same circumstances, only to be convinced later that it was wrong?’ Hobbes 1993, p. 39. Demonet (1992, p. 286) gives this as ‘le principal argument aristote´licien contre la naturalite´ des langues’. Cf. Descartes (1984b, p. 126) and Arnauld and Nicole (1996, p. 28), who use the premise, contra Hobbes (as they understand him), to prove that reasoning does not depend on names. Lodwick 1969 (the title of the work is A Common Writing, whereby Two, although Not Understanding One the Others Language, yet by the Helpe thereof, May Communicate their Minds One to Another). Cf. Clauss 1995, p. 42.

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languages, men share the same thoughts.19 Wilkins declares that ‘as men do generally agree in the same principle of reason, so do they likewise agree in the same internal notion or apprehension of things’.20 Dalgarno claims that language conveys ‘the most intimate motions and conceptions of the soule, by which all humane societies are united’.21 Besnier explains that, while in their present form languages are subject to ‘the whisling oyishness of custome’, they can be united because they ‘are unquestionably founded on reason’.22 In a letter to Mersenne, dated 20 November 1629, Descartes lays out his ambitious manifesto for a universal language. It would be made of ‘all the thoughts which can come into the human mind’.23 A common mental base also emerges in the prevalent beliefs in innate ideas and maxims.24 Lamy lists ‘natural and original truths’ which are ‘fundamentally inherent in our natures’, such as ‘That we are to give every man his due; That it is impossible for a thing to be and not to be at the same time’.25 In his De veritate (1624) Herbert of Cherbury lays down ‘common notions’ of sense (like the common idea of a rose) and also ‘principles’ that are inscribed in every mind (like ‘nature does nothing in vain’).26 Robert South mounts a similar attack on Aristotle’s ‘rasa tabula’. He declares that there are certain ‘universal notions’ which are ‘ingenite, and imprinted by the finger of nature’, such as ‘the whole is bigger than the part’. Like Lamy and Herbert, he asserts that these principles are of a practical, as well as a speculative nature, such as ‘that God is to be worshipped; that parents are to be honoured, that a man’s word is to be kept’.27 In his Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality Ralph Cudworth attests to ‘universal and immutable truths’, ‘ectypal signatures’ ‘printed’ in our minds.28 Within the broad, unquestioned framework of mental universality, contemporaries explore moderate versions of semantic diversity. In their desperation for perspicuous language, they express unease about equivocity. Philosophers do not generally present the problem as endemic to language but use it to attack their enemies. Boyle begins his Sceptical Chymist (1661) 19 22 24

25

26 27

28

Bacon 1857, iv, pp. 440–1. 20 Wilkins 1968, p. 20. 21 Dalgarno 2001a, p. 90. Besnier 1971, p. 3. 23 Descartes 1981, p. 5. See Yolton (1993, pp. 30–48) on the ‘firmness’ (p. 30) of the innatist tradition in English moral and religious thought. Lamy 1986, pp. 184–5. See Kraye (1998, p. 1303) on the Malebranchian moral truths known with the same clear and distinct certainty as mathematical truths. Herbert of Cherbury 1937, pp. 78; 132. South 1823a, pp. 36; 39. Locke was given volume three of South’s Sermons by the author (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 236). Cudworth 1731, pp. 258; 251. See Kraye (1998, pp. 1290–2) on Cambridge Platonist morality, which was against voluntarism and (therefore) ethical relativism; Hutton (1999) on the still strong hold of Aristotelianism over Cudworth.

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with an assault on the ‘obscure, ambiguous, and almost aenigmatical’ expressions of chemists.29 Bemoaning their ‘intolerable Ambiguity’, he feels compelled ‘to take notice to you and complain of the unreasonable liberty they give themselves of playing with names at pleasure’.30 Beyond accusing their opponents of outrageous linguistic licence, philosophers intimate a more comprehensive problem, to which even the best-willed speakers sometimes fall victim. Boyle returns to verbal multivocity in A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature (1686). There he enumerates the meanings that cluster invisibly under the name ‘nature’. He identifies eight ‘absolute acceptions’, but says that ‘it has divers others’. He laments that ‘the very great ambiguity of this term, and the promiscuous use men are wont to make of it’, causes unintelligible, improper, and false speech. However, he proposes that the mists can be dispersed if, when people speak a word, they ‘would add a word or two to declare in what clear and determinate sense they use it’.31 Some perception of the problem of semantic individualism underpins the century’s conciliatory refrain that the argument is not real but merely verbal. Bacon explains that, due to the ontologically unsound foundations of words, ‘great and solemn debates between learned men often end in arguments over words and names’. He advocates the favourite remedy of defining one’s terms.32 The thought is that different people have the same basic ideas, but that they attach them differently to names, and that therefore they would agree if they spelt out exactly what they meant. Boyle declares that without definitions ‘wranglings about words and names will be (if not continually multiplied) still kept on foot, as are wont to be managed with much heat, though little use, and no necessity.’33 He repeats the commonplace: ‘for aught I can perceive, the differences betwixt the more sober men of both parties is more about words than things’.34 At a time when the explanatory ground was moving under their feet, the newly collaborative philosophers of the seventeenth century use verbal disagreement to pour oil on troubled waters. Descartes urges Regius to tone down his impolitic attack on scholastics by conceding that their disagreement is ‘merely verbal’.35 In his Regulae ad directionem ingenii he refers to the ‘obscurity of language’, and the way in which ‘in the vast 29 31 32 33 34 35

Boyle 1661, sig. A3r. 30 Boyle 1661, p. 199. Boyle 1979b, pp. 177; 178. Locke had this text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 93). Bacon 1994b, p. 64. Boyle 1979b, p. 178. Boyle 1744, p. 481. Locke had this text (Harrison and Laslett 1965, p. 93). Descartes 1991, p. 206. On the self-fashioned, self-legitimating, open, public, consensual new science, see Eamon 1990; Feingold 1991, p. 74; Shapin and Schaffer 1985, pp. 333–6. Walmsley

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majority of issues about which the learned dispute, the problem is almost always one of words’.36 Descartes’ placatory optimism extends to the statement that ‘if philosophers always agreed about the meanings of words, their controversies would almost all be at an end’.37 While we saw the Port-Royal Logique explode the myth of semantic universalism at one point, they generally ignore it as they progress through the well-worn workings of ‘the mind’. They also fall into line by characterising interpersonal disagreement as superficial and soluble. When people do not bother to define their terms, ‘the majority of their disagreements are only verbal.’38 ‘Nominal definitions’ offer a passage out of these ‘useless disputes over words that one person understands one way and another in another way, as so often happens even in ordinary speech’.39 Spinoza is another citizen of the friendly republic of letters. He responds to Tschirnhaus’ attempts to reconcile his (Spinoza’s) view of freedom with Descartes’, by agreeing that it might indeed be the case that ‘although they use the same words, are yet thinking of different things’.40 He blames the wrangling so endemic to human interaction on careless communication. If men bothered to listen and to ‘explain their own mind’, their ‘vehement’ controversies would end, as they saw that ‘they either have the same thoughts, or they are thinking of different things, so that what they think are errors and absurdities in the other are not.’41 hobbes Not one to soften his blows, Hobbes has strong, if not contradictory, views on the matter. He maintains that every word – in the human sciences, if not the natural ones – has only one proper meaning.42 He

36

37 39

40 41 42

(1993) describes the new scientists’ candid, collective ‘conversational rhetoric’ (p. 386). See Shapin (1994) on the construction of the truth-telling gentleman scientist. Descartes 1985a, p. 53. He continues: ‘there is no need, however, to have such a low opinion of great minds as to think that they have a wrong conception of the things themselves when they fail to explain them in terms which are quite appropriate’. Descartes 1985a, p. 54. 38 Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 62. Arnauld and Nicole 1996, p. 63. A nominal definition narrows down a word to one, clear definition in accordance with the speaker’s desire. Spinoza 1928, p. 294. He goes on to outline his determinism. Spinoza 1994, p. 62. Cf. 1994, p. 61, on different understandings of ‘circle’. Hobbes explains that natural knowledge can only be a posteriori because we do not know the causes of the phenomenal effects. But, as with geometry, where ‘we ourselves draw the lines’ and where the generation of figures ‘depends on our will’, we can have fully demonstrable a priori knowledge of ‘politics and ethics . . . because we ourselves make the principles – that is, the causes of justice (namely laws and covenants) – whereby it is known what justice and equity, and their opposites injustice and inequity, are. For before covenants and laws were drawn up, neither justice

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simultaneously offers a deeply subjective and divergent semantic theory, thereby seeming to dissolve his rigid semantic universalism. The first, dogmatic stance relates normatively to the artificial subject of the state, the second to natural man, although even the might of the commonwealth struggles to stem natural speech. I turn first to Hobbes’ confident claims for monolithic word-meanings. Reacting fiercely against the fluid morality embedded in the scientia civilis of the rhetorical tradition and its fatal application in the English civil war and regicide, he dictates an objective semantics.43 In his sights is the Aristotelian continuum of virtue and vice, whereby good might be redescribed as bad, by means of the rhetorical technique of paradiastole. ‘How unconstantly names have been settled’, he complains, ‘and how subject they are to equivocation, and how diversified by passion, (scarce two men agreeing what is to be called good, and what evil: what liberality, what prodigality; what valour, what temerity)’.44 He argues that his moral science, deduced from the reflexively accessible warring, rational nature of man, overthrows the evaluative paradigm whereby the human world is subject to self-interested revisions. Erasing his own authorship, he proffers a demonstrable theory of the virtues. He proves that which is conducive to peace, ‘good’, and ought to be so called. According to the (Hobbesian) rule of propriety, rebellion is necessarily unjust. Those who call it otherwise fall into the unreasonable, slavish and passionate practice of the wilful misapplication of words, naming ‘good and bad, according to their passions, or according to the authorities’ they admire (like ‘Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca’), rather than ‘their true and generally agreed-upon names’.45 Hobbes provides us with a reified map of axiomatic definitions. ‘All these words, Hee that in his actions observeth the Lawes of his Country, make but one Name, equivalent to this one word, Just.’46 It is the overarching aim of A Dialogue Between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England to establish dialectically that ‘it is not wisdom, but authority that makes a law’.47 ‘Free’ means ‘free from being hindred by opposition’, making a mockery of the ‘absurd’ phrases ‘free-will’ and

43

44 47

nor injustice, neither public good nor public evil, was natural amongst men any more than it was among beasts’ (Hobbes 1993, pp. 41–3). This is an uneasy epistemological division which Locke is to follow. It is uneasy in both authors because the adequate definitions in moral science still flow from the nature of man. See Skinner (1996) on Hobbes’ reformulation of scientia civilis as a demonstrable civil science; see also Skinner 1991; Skinner 1993. Cf. Boonin-Vail 1994; Silver 1996. Hobbes 1969, p. 23. 45 Hobbes 1969, p. 177. 46 Hobbes 1996, p. 26. Hobbes 1971a, p. 55. Cf. Cromartie (1995) on common law as the practical embodiment of natural law; Pocock (1987) on the eternal/historical constitution.

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‘free subject’.48 When Hobbes turns to Scriptural exegesis in the second half of Leviathan, he inflexibly refers to the ‘proper’ senses of words. His uncompromising materialism leads him to reject the use of ‘spirit’, in any other than a metaphorical sense.49 Satan emerges as ‘an earthly enemy of the church’, and hell as a miserable life on earth.50 While Hobbes’ use of language differs wildly from his contemporaries’, particularly in the sphere of biblical hermeneutics, he envisages a perfectly univocal language. With the help of a metaphor (the professional agent of semantic proliferation as it rips words from their proper meanings) he describes his linguistic idyll. ‘The Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity.’51 The common nature of man can ground mental–semantic uniformity. As Hobbes says, ‘reason is no less of the nature of man than passion, and is the same in all men, because all men agree in the will to be directed and governed in the way to that which they desire to attain, namely their own good, which is the work of reason’.52 By ‘reading himself’ and thereby discovering ‘man-kind’, he deduces an eternally and universally true civil science.53 This bold advertisement for semantic universalism turns out to be more of a pipe dream than a realistic description of linguistic praxis. There is a desperate quality to Hobbes’ Eden, as though he fears his words are falling – as ever – on deaf ears. This undercurrent finds a torrent of expression at other points in the oeuvre. I probe two areas of concern. The first is a sense that in our everyday speech there is an inadvertent, endemic semantic instability and miscommunication. Linguistic signs are just one section of the disconcerting semiotic prospect that constitutes our experience. Innumerable images – of bodies, events, demeanours – fly at us, their significance unclear and often unknowable. Words are part of this onslaught. Their strange phonetic qualities land upon our ears. They gradually, uncertainly gain semantic content through repeated observation of their context. It is on the basis of uncertain conjecture that most people learn what a sound means by noting when people call things ‘just and unjust’, for example, and trying to establish a standard of uniform reference.54 48 49 52

53 54

Hobbes 1996, p. 34. Cf. Skinner (1990) on the proper signification of liberty according to Hobbes. Hobbes 1996, p. 270. 50 Hobbes 1996, p. 314. 51 Hobbes 1996, p. 36. Hobbes 1969, p. 75. Cf. 1996, p. 35: ‘For all men by nature reason alike, and well, when they have good principles.’ Hobbes 1996, pp. 10; 11. Hobbes 1969, pp. 16–17: ‘We cannot from experience conclude, that any thing is to be called just or unjust, true or false, nor any proposition universal whatsoever, except it be from remembrance of the use of names imposed arbitrarily by men. For example: to have heard a sentence given

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Hobbesian semantic dissension goes far beyond the ‘equivocal names’ in sophisms.55 Opening up an endless panorama of possibility, he says that ‘all the significations of almost all words, are either in themselves, or in the metaphoricall use of them, ambiguous; and may be drawn in argument, to make many senses’.56 In the Elements of Law (written 1640) he radically multiplies the tidy, and faintly ridiculous, binary ambiguities of words such as ‘dog’.57 Many words lack constant signification, but bring to mind other thoughts than those for which they were ordained . . . And there is scarce any word that is not made equivocal by divers contextures of speech, or by diversity of pronunciation and gesture. This equivocation of names maketh it difficult to recover those conceptions for which the name was ordained; and that not only in the language of other men, wherein we are to consider the drift, and occasion, and contexture of the speech, as well as the words themselves; but also in our own discourse, which being derived from the custom and common use of speech, representeth not unto us our own conceptions.58

When words are animated in moving, feeling, alien individuals, they become obscure to the listener. Their ‘true meaning’– the intention of the speaker – is hidden from sight.59 And even in our own mouths, words are not so much our own, as the product of communities to whose decisions we have neither wholly nor consciously consented. Hobbes elaborates on self-reflexive semantic obscurity in an abuse of speech whereby ‘men register their thoughts wrong, by the inconstancy of the signification of their words; by which they register for their conceptions, that which they never conceived; and so deceive themselves’.60 Unbeknown to us, our words belie their smooth surfaces, their meaning diversifying and evaporating. Hobbes repeats his concern over our quotidian mutual unintelligibility when he discusses ancient texts. If word meaning is only just discernible

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(in the like case the like sentence a thousand times) is not enough to conclude that the sentence is just (though most men have no other means to conclude by); but it is necessary, for the drawing of such conclusion, to trace and find out, by many experiences, what men do mean by calling things just and unjust, and the like.’ It is worth noting that this, Hobbes’ experiential account of how men learn the meanings of words according to common use, sits somewhat uneasily with his scientific account of how individuals use their reason to deduce the definitions of words – a process which often involves the rejection of common parlance. These tensions between communal and individual use, and between uncertain conjecture and certain knowledge about meaning, simmer beneath the surface of early-modern philosophy of language. Ross (1987) asserts that Hobbes’ ‘ordinary language theory’ anticipates Wittgenstein’s approach to linguistic usage (pp. 46; 48). Hobbes 1981, p. 20. 56 Hobbes 1996, p. 194. As we saw in chapter 1, ‘dog’ is a logicians’ example of ambiguity, meaning both a star and an animal. Hobbes 1969, pp. 20–1. 59 Hobbes 1969, p. 21. 60 Hobbes 1996, p. 25.

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through the careful inferences we draw in the living presence of speakers on the basis of their actions and context, then the practice of reading the classics becomes laughable: Though words be the signs we have of one another’s opinions and intentions; yet, because the equivocation of them is so frequent according to the diversity of contexture, and of the company wherewith they go (which the presence of him that speaketh, our sight of his actions, and conjecture of his intentions, must help to discharge us of): it must be extreme hard to find out the opinions and meanings of those men that are gone from us long ago, and have left us no other signification thereof but their books; which cannot possibly be understood without history enough to discover those aforementioned circumstances, and also without great prudence to observe them.61

Hobbes intimates the way in which a speaker’s intention, which it is the job of words to communicate, gets lost in the act of articulation, fading almost entirely when the speaker is absent and all that remains is de-located text. Far from being secured to words, meanings proliferate irretrievably. Despite his own self-proclaimed hermeneutic virtuosity, Hobbes’ treatment of textual exegesis concedes some constructive role to the reader. His vehement insistence on the sovereign’s right to interpret both law and Scripture evokes the necessity of interpretation, and the multiple readings inherent in texts.62 Of themselves, texts do not signify effectively, but require further elucidation. ‘All Laws, written, and unwritten, have need of Interpretation.’63 He depicts a great distance between the original intention of the writers of Scripture and the words themselves. ‘For it is not the bare words, but the scope of the writer that giveth the true light, by which any writing is to bee interpreted.’64 Hobbes’ use of the Pauline distinction between the spirit and the letter of the law indicates that the letter of the law does not communicate effectively but that its ‘spirit’, ‘intendment, or meaning’ or ‘the sense of the legislator’ has to be eked out by an authoritative reader.65 His concern about verbal promiscuity leads him to advocate concise laws. ‘All words, are subject to ambiguity; and therefore multiplication of words in the body of the Law, is multiplication of ambiguity.’66 In a rare contemporary remark about the communication process Hobbes refers to the way in which meaning is constructed differently in speaker and hearer. His stringent nominalism leads him into a stunning statement of interpersonal semantic incommensurability: ‘it is plain 61 64 66

Hobbes 1969, p. 68. 62 E.g. Hobbes 1996, p. 269. 63 Hobbes 1996, p. 190. 65 Hobbes 1996, p. 415 (cf. p. 425). Hobbes 1996, p. 190. Hobbes 1996, p. 240. Cf. Locke 1975, p. 480 (iii.ix.9).

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therefore, that there is nothing universal but names; which are therefore also called indefinite; because we limit them not ourselves, but leave them to be applied by the hearer.’67 Words are not ‘perspicuous’, to quote Hobbes back at himself.68 His second concern about semantic instability is more specific and relates to the indeterminate applications of evaluative terms. The protestations which I recounted above about free-floating evaluative terms and their misapplication sound strained when we consider his view that there is no natural right reason, and therefore no univocal application of words, but as many applications as there are different interpretations.69 People take their passions ‘for right Reason’. This turns out to mean ‘no other mens reason but their own.’70 While it is, as Hobbes pleads, demonstrable, the law of nature has serious need of interpretation by the sovereign because it is so divergently understood by those who are ‘blinded by self love, or some other passion.’71 It is due to the deeply subjective, hedonistic use of language that the sovereign and his laws can be the only measure of justice. Only he can determine whether actions ‘be right or wrong, profitable or unprofitable, virtuous or vicious; and by them the use and definition of all names not agreed upon, and tending to controversy, shall be established.’72 Given that there are ‘so many men, so many opinions’, ‘a common standard for virtues and vices doth not appear except in civil life’.73 Hobbes’ semantic diversity has its roots in the heterogeneous view of humanity that we met in Montaigne. ‘In the condition of meer Nature’: Good and Evill, are names that signifie our Appetites, and Aversions; which in different tempers, customes, and doctrines of men, are different: And divers men, differ not onely in their Judgement, on the senses of what is pleasant, and unpleasant to the tast, smell, hearing, touch, and sight; but also of what is conformable, or disagreeable to Reason, in the actions of common life. Nay, the same man, in divers times, differs from himselfe; and one time praiseth, that is, calleth Good, what another time he dispraiseth, and calleth Evil.74 67

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Hobbes 1969, p. 20. Cf. Nerney (1991, p. 75) on the continuity between natural linguistic ‘confusion’ and civil ‘understanding’. Hobbes 1969, p. 36. Remember the need for an ‘arbitrator’ to decide what is a ‘man’ or not (Hobbes 1996, pp. 32–3). Hobbes 1996, p. 33. 71 Hobbes 1996, p. 191. Hobbes 1969, p. 189. Cf. 1971a (p. 67) on the absence of ‘an universal reason agreed upon in any nation, besides the reason of him that hath the sovereign power’. Hobbes 1993, pp. 68–9. Hobbes 1996, pp. 110–11. Cf. 1969, p. 29: ‘every man, for his own part, calleth that which pleaseth, and is delightful to himself, good; and that evil which displeaseth him: insomuch that while every man differeth from other in constitution, they differ also one from another concerning the common distinction of good and evil’; 1993, p. 47: ‘since different men desire and shun different things, there must needs be many things that are good to some and evil to others’.

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Word meaning, comprising, as it does, the speaker’s ideas, is not only hostage to individual speakers, but to the multiple moods of the same speaker. We have already seen (in chapter 4) Hobbes draw on Protagoras’ claim, that man is the measure of all things, to intimate the fantasies that language estimates about the natural world.75 This ancient challenge also echoes through Hobbes’ meditations on the way in which the use of moral language says more about its users than its objects. He spells this out in a fascinating passage in Leviathan: The names of such things as affect us, that is, which please, and displease us, because all men be not alike affected with the same thing, nor the same man at all times, are in the common discourses of men, of inconstant signification. For seeing all names are imposed to signifie our conceptions; and all our affections are but conceptions; when we conceive the same things differently, we can hardly avoyd different naming of them. For though the nature of that we conceive, be the same; yet the diversity of our reception of it, in respect of different constitutions of body, and prejudices of opinion, gives every thing a tincture of our different passions. And therefore in reasoning, a man must take heed of words; which besides the signification of what we imagine of their nature, have a signification also of the nature, disposition, and interest of the speaker; such as are the names of virtues, and vices; for one man calleth wisdome, what another calleth feare; and one cruelty, what another justice; one prodigality, what another magnanimity; and one gravity, what another stupidity, &c. And therefore such names can never be true grounds of any ratiocination. No more can Metaphors, and Tropes of speech: but these are less dangerous, because they profess their inconstancy; which the other do not.76

Using paradiastole, the favourite model for the indeterminacy and manipulability of words, Hobbes explains how our passions dye our perceptions, and therefore our descriptions, of things. There is no singular description of the moral status of an action. There are only subjective interpretations. While metaphors confess themselves to be sites of multiple signification, evaluative language conceals a mass of referents, recording our peculiar reception of the world. The res–verba connection dissolves; meaning loses its objective status, and is incarnated only in the mouths and ears of individuals. pascal Riven by the indelible Fall, Pascal is extremely pessimistic about linguistic homogeneity. In the following pense´e he refers to the possibility of semantic multiplication: 75

Hobbes 1996, p. 15.

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Hobbes 1996, p. 31.

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We suppose (nous supposons) that everyone thinks of these things in the same way. But the assumption is mere conjecture, since we have no proof. I am aware that we use these words in the same situations, and that whenever two men see an object move they both talk about that object in the same words, both saying it has moved. From that identical set of words we draw the strong impression of an identical set of ideas (d’une conformite´ d’ide´e). But that does not absolutely convince us with ultimate conviction, although we could well lay bets on it.77

Pascal illuminates an important element that lurks in early-modern philosophy of language. Harnessing his own innovative development of the concept of probability, he explains that we can never know for certain that our identical words mean the same things for different people, given the irrevocable invisibility of our thoughts.78 It becomes clear that he doubts, despite our (misplaced) confidence to the contrary, that one mental discourse underlies our uniform language. The odds are long. This is particularly likely to be the case for Pascal given that he stands, petrified, in the fragmented shadows of both the Augustinian and the Montaignian selves.79 And he himself can be seen in Locke when he (Pascal) writes ‘I feel that I might never have existed, since my self consists in my thinking.’80 He exposes the fluid possibilities that follow from identifying personal identity with consciousness. ‘Time heals pain and quarrels, because we change: we are no longer the same person; neither the offender nor the offended are the same. It is like a people whom we have angered and have come back to see after two generations: they are still French, but not the same.’81 In the following passage, Pascal evokes the miscellany that makes up human ‘nature’: Diversity is so great that all the tones of voice, ways of walking, coughing, blowing one’s nose, sneezing (are different). We distinguish grapes from among fruits, then from them muscat grapes, and then those from Condrieu, and then 77

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Pascal 1995a, p. 35 (1963, p. 512). Pascal’s use of ‘suppose’ echoes the Terminists’ ‘supposition’ theory and presages Locke’s denunciation of the false ‘supposition’ of communication. Davidson (1979) explores the ‘dynamic and paradoxical way’ (p. x) Pascal plays with the meanings of the words which signify the means to an indubitable faith. See Hacking (1975a) on the emergence of probability and Pascal’s crucial place in the story (p. 70). Cf. Daston (1998) on the new probabilism in the seventeenth century. See Hunter (2002, p. 105) on Pascal’s Augustinian sense that we are a paradox to ourselves. Pascal 1995a, p. 44 (1963, p. 516: ‘je sens que je puis n’avoir point e´te´, car le moi consiste dans ma pense´e’). Cf. Marin (1975) on fragmentation and meaning in Pascal; Norman (1973) on Pascal’s resistance to Jesuit casuistry and his attempt to bridge the gap between language and thought with a natural style. See Moriarty (2003) on the incursions into French solipsism and the supposedly self-contained Cartesian ego, especially by Malebranche’s presentation of human relations as ‘so many occasions of imaginative contagion’ (p. 250). Pascal 1995a, p. 146.

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those from Desargues, and then the particular graft. Is that all? Has it ever produced two bunches the same? And has a bunch produced two grapes the same? And so on. I have never judged something in exactly the same way. I cannot judge a work while doing it: I have to do as painters do, and stand back, but not too far. How far then? Guess.82

Pascal’s bewildering survey of grapes mirrors the diversity he identifies in and between people. If our minds are inconsistent and elusive, then so too are the contents of our words. Pascal explicitly links inter- and intrapersonal divergence to language in De l’art de persuader. He enumerates two methods of persuasion, ‘one of convincing, the other of pleasing.’83 While he can deliver universal rules for the former, the latter would be near-impossible, due to the ‘fickleness of our whims’.84 ‘The reason for this extreme difficulty comes from the fact that the principles of pleasure are not firm and steadfast. They are different for everyone, and vary in each particular, with such diversity that there is no one more unlike another than themselves at different periods’.85 Here again is that Montaignian tag, hinting at the infinite and untold semantic shreds which are pinned to words. Pascal explains that meaning is not controlled by the author, but created anew by individual readers. Often a brilliant author will have delivered his rich mind to the world, only to have it poorly understood. ‘It is then that the difference between the same statement in several mouths (bouches) is the most apparent.’86 He is concerned that his own art of convincing will be treated as a mere reiteration of the rules of reasoning long peddled in the schools, and in a rare moment of selfdefence he declares that ‘if they have penetrated the spirit of these rules, and if the rules have made sufficient impression to take root and establish themselves, these people will realize how great a difference there is between what is said here, and what a few logicians have perhaps written by chance somewhere or another in their works, which approximate to it’.87 While Pascal does suppose that a careful reader who internalises the 82 83 84 85

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Pascal 1995a, p. 115. Pascal 1995b, p. 196 (1963, p. 356: ‘l’une de convaincre, l’autre d’agre´er’). Pascal 1995a, p. 117. See Davidson 1983. Pascal 1995b, p. 196 (1963, p. 356: ‘ . . . ils sont divers en tous les hommes et variables dans chaque particulier avec une telle diversite´, qu’il n’y a point d’homme plus diffe´rent d’un autre q