we need suppose no linguistic impediments to intercourse. the whole world will surely have a common language, that is quite elementarily utopian, and since we are free of the trammels of convincing story-telling, we may suppose that language to be sufficiently our own to understand. indeed, should we be in utopia at all, if we could not talk to everyone? that accursed bar of language, that hostile inscription in the foreigner’s eyes, “deaf and dumb to you, sir, and so — your enemy,” is the very first of the defects and complications one has fled the earth to escape.
but what sort of language would we have the world speak, if we were told the miracle of babel was presently to be reversed?
if i may take a daring image, a mediaeval liberty, i would suppose that in this lonely place the spirit of creation spoke to us on this matter. “you are wise men,” that spirit might say — and i, being a suspicious, touchy, over-earnest man for all my predisposition to plumpness, would instantly scent the irony (while my companion, i fancy, might even plume himself), “and to beget your wisdom is chiefly why the world was made. you are so good as to propose an acceleration of that tedious multitudinous evolution upon which i am engaged. i gather, a universal tongue would serve you there. while i sit here among these mountains — i have been filing away at them for this last aeon or so, just to attract your hotels, you know — will you be so kind ——? a few hints ——?”
then the spirit of creation might transiently smile, a smile that would be like the passing of a cloud. all the mountain wilderness about us would be radiantly lit. (you know those swift moments, when warmth and brightness drift by, in lonely and desolate places.)
yet, after all, why should two men be smiled into apathy by the infinite? here we are, with our knobby little heads, our eyes and hands and feet and stout hearts, and if not us or ours, still the endless multitudes about us and in our loins are to come at last to the world state and a greater fellowship and the universal tongue. let us to the extent of our ability, if not answer that question, at any rate try to think ourselves within sight of the best thing possible. that, after all, is our purpose, to imagine our best and strive for it, and it is a worse folly and a worse sin than presumption, to abandon striving because the best of all our bests looks mean amidst the suns.
now you as a botanist would, i suppose, incline to something as they say, “scientific.” you wince under that most offensive epithet — and i am able to give you my intelligent sympathy — though “pseudo-scientific” and “quasi-scientific” are worse by far for the skin. you would begin to talk of scientific languages, of esperanto, la langue bleue, new latin, volapuk, and lord lytton, of the philosophical language of archbishop whateley, lady welby’s work upon significs and the like. you would tell me of the remarkable precisions, the encyclopaedic quality of chemical terminology, and at the word terminology i should insinuate a comment on that eminent american biologist, professor mark baldwin, who has carried the language biological to such heights of expressive clearness as to be triumphantly and invincibly unreadable. (which foreshadows the line of my defence.)
you make your ideal clear, a scientific language you demand, without ambiguity, as precise as mathematical formulae, and with every term in relations of exact logical consistency with every other. it will be a language with all the inflexions of verbs and nouns regular and all its constructions inevitable, each word clearly distinguishable from every other word in sound as well as spelling.
that, at any rate, is the sort of thing one hears demanded, and if only because the demand rests upon implications that reach far beyond the region of language, it is worth considering here. it implies, indeed, almost everything that we are endeavouring to repudiate in this particular work. it implies that the whole intellectual basis of mankind is established, that the rules of logic, the systems of counting and measurement, the general categories and schemes of resemblance and difference, are established for the human mind for ever — blank comte-ism, in fact, of the blankest description. but, indeed, the science of logic and the whole framework of philosophical thought men have kept since the days of plato and aristotle, has no more essential permanence as a final expression of the human mind, than the scottish longer catechism. amidst the welter of modern thought, a philosophy long lost to men rises again into being, like some blind and almost formless embryo, that must presently develop sight, and form, and power, a philosophy in which this assumption is denied. [footnote: the serious reader may refer at leisure to sidgwick’s use of words in reasoning (particularly), and to bosanquet’s essentials of logic, bradley’s principles of logic, and sigwart’s logik; the lighter minded may read and mark the temper of professor case in the british encyclopaedia, article logic (vol. xxx.). i have appended to his book a rude sketch of a philosophy upon new lines, originally read by me to the oxford phil. soc. in 1903.]
all through this utopian excursion, i must warn you, you shall feel the thrust and disturbance of that insurgent movement. in the reiterated use of “unique,” you will, as it were, get the gleam of its integument; in the insistence upon individuality, and the individual difference as the significance of life, you will feel the texture of its shaping body. nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of being. being, indeed! — there is no being, but a universal becoming of individualities, and plato turned his back on truth when he turned towards his museum of specific ideals. heraclitus, that lost and misinterpreted giant, may perhaps be coming to his own. . . .
there is no abiding thing in what we know. we change from weaker to stronger lights, and each more powerful light pierces our hitherto opaque foundations and reveals fresh and different opacities below. we can never foretell which of our seemingly assured fundamentals the next change will not affect. what folly, then, to dream of mapping out our minds in however general terms, of providing for the endless mysteries of the future a terminology and an idiom! we follow the vein, we mine and accumulate our treasure, but who can tell which way the vein may trend? language is the nourishment of the thought of man, that serves only as it undergoes metabolism, and becomes thought and lives, and in its very living passes away. you scientific people, with your fancy of a terrible exactitude in language, of indestructible foundations built, as that wordsworthian doggerel on the title-page of nature says, “for aye,” are marvellously without imagination!
the language of utopia will no doubt be one and indivisible; all mankind will, in the measure of their individual differences in quality, be brought into the same phase, into a common resonance of thought, but the language they will speak will still be a living tongue, an animated system of imperfections, which every individual man will infinitesimally modify. through the universal freedom of exchange and movement, the developing change in its general spirit will be a world-wide change; that is the quality of its universality. i fancy it will be a coalesced language, a synthesis of many. such a language as english is a coalesced language; it is a coalescence of anglo-saxon and norman french and scholar’s latin, welded into one speech more ample and more powerful and beautiful than either. the utopian tongue might well present a more spacious coalescence, and hold in the frame of such an uninflected or slightly inflected idiom as english already presents, a profuse vocabulary into which have been cast a dozen once separate tongues, superposed and then welded together through bilingual and trilingual compromises. [footnote: vide an excellent article, la langue francaise en l’an 2003, par leon bollack, in la revue, 15 juillet, 1903.] in the past ingenious men have speculated on the inquiry, “which language will survive?” the question was badly put. i think now that this wedding and survival of several in a common offspring is a far more probable thing.
