The swift and secret messenger: John Wilkins’s "Mercury" and the paradoxes of language
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Date
2016
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Adam Mickiewicz University
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Abstract
John Wilkins’s Mercury or the Secret and Swift Messenger: Showing How a Man May with
Privacy and Speed Communicate His Thoughts to a Friend at Any Distance was first published in
1641. As a book on cryptography presenting a variety of secret means of communication at a
distance it seems to have appeared at just the right time, when the biblical curse of the confusion
of tongues was doubled by the curse of political confusion on the brink of the English civil war.
However, the book seems to be more than just a detailed account of methods of secret writing; its
topic gives the author a chance to present his views on language which he would later develop in
his life’s work An Essay towards Real Character and a Philosophical Language published in
1668. The Essay had received much greater critical attention than the early pamphlet, which is
usually referred to as merely a prelude to an account of his universal language project. Indeed, in
the little book on cryptography, Wilkins already demonstrated his awareness of the conventional
character of language and its role within the system of human interactions, as well as advertised a
project of philosophical language that would enhance communication between all nations and
remedy the curse of Babel. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the value of the pamphlet
lies also in the insight that it gives into the seventeenth-century debates on the nature of language
and into arguments which were often provided, in equal measure, by theology, Hermetic lore,
mythology, literature and early modern science. Wilkins’s meticulous recording of the
contradictory views and propositions on language produces a sense of methodological
inconsistency that leads to ambiguities and paradoxes. However, in the medley of concepts and
the collection of linguistic “curiosities” that Mercury presents, a careful reader will discern the
growing mistrust of language as a means of representing reality and as a foundation of
knowledge, which was one of the symptoms of the general crisis of representation leading to an
epistemological shift that started in the seventeenth century.
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Keywords
universal language, cryptography, John Wilkins, Mercury, philosophy of language
Citation
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, vol. 51.2(2016), pp. 77-91
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ISBN
ISSN
0081-6272