Can you place the following quote?
…my invention uses reason in its entirety and it, in addition, a judge of controversies, an interpreter of notions, a balance of probabilities, a compass which will guide us over the ocean of experiences, an inventory of things, a table of thoughts, a microscope for scrutinizing present things, a telescope for predicting distant things, a general calculus, an innocent magic, a non-chimerical cabal, a script which all will read in their own language; and even a language which one will be able to learn in a few weeks, and which will be soon accepted amidst the world. And which will lead the way for the true religion everywhere it goes.
I have to admit when I first read the part about “…one will be able to learn it in a few week,…” I was thinking about John Sowa and one of his various proposals (some say perversions) of natural language.
Then I got to the part about “…the way for the true religion…” and realized that this was probably either a fundamentalist quote (you pick the tradition) or from an earlier time.
Curious? It was Leibniz, Letter to Duke of Hanover, 1679. Quoted in The Search For The Perfect Language by Umberto Eco. More on the book in later posts.
[…] very old idea, the perfect language, which has a universal and unbroken record of failure. (see my Blast from the Past and citations […]
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