Swift and linguistics: The context behind Lagado and around the fourth voyage

S W I F T A N D L I N G U I S T I C S : T H E C O N T E X T B E H I N D L A G A D O A N D A R O U N D T H E

F O U R T H V O Y A G E

Swift's concerns for the state of the English Language oscillated between solemn public prescriptions on its corruptions, esoteric private dialects and parodic etymological jokes. The Tatler letter (1710) on corruptions of style led to "a plan for a society or academy for correcting and settling our language" (the Proposal for Correcting the English Tongue, 1712). A Discourse to Prove the Antiquity of the English Tongue, an extended etymological spoof, was posthumously published. The language academy satire and anagrams in Gulliver's Travels, the coded "little language" in the Journal to Stella, the bizarre puns, riddles and aenigmas in his poems, all show a variety of purposes. An exuberant exploitation of the potential of language to communicate and obscure is common to all. Swift's delight in parodying "Dark Authors" is the stylistic comple- ment of the principle of Simplicity, articulated without irony in the Letter to a Young Gentlemen Lately entered into Holy Orders (1721).

Though Swift's verbal codes in the Travels and in the Journal to Stella have been cracked by various commentators 1, my first contention is that the apparently disparate linguistic satires in the satirically most significant series in the Academy of Lagado imitate a mode and parody a group of schemes which existed in the seventeenth century linguists, typically in the work of John Wilkins. In the second part of this article, and prompted by R. S. Crane's discovery of logic-book references in the Fourth Voyage 2, I attempt to chart the terminological continuity of the noun series Man, Horse and Monkey, not only in logic, but in "new" grammars and in some philosophy, before 1726 and for some years subsequent to the appearance of Gulliver's Travels.

In that part of the Academy of Lagado reserved for "Projectors in speculative learning" (III, 5), Gulliver sees the following schemes: a word-frame which would "give the world a compleat Body of all Arts and Sciences"; a project to "shorten Discourse by cutting Polysyllables into one, and leaving out Verbs and Participles; because in Reality all things imaginable are but Nouns"; a scheme for the entire abolition of words and their replacement by the things to which they refer (an elaboration of the previous scheme), which would thereby supply "an universal language"; and a project for the literal digestion of knowledge recorded on edible paper. In the following chapter Gulliver visits the School of Political Projectors, and Swift exposes another element of linguistic virtuosity in the Lagadian cypher experts, "very dextrous in

426 Clive I". Probyn - Swift and Linguistics etc.

finding out the mysterious Meanings of Words, Syllables and Letters. ''a By today's linguistic standards this appears a list of heterogeneous foolish projects, linked only perhaps by a common epistemology, but which Swift has made absurdly mechanistic.

The first in Swift's list is the word-machine. The intellectual tradition behind this complex image was noted by Sir Walter Scott and more recent- ly discussed by Irvin Ehrenpreis 4. The latter cogently argues that Epi- curean materialism is both its context and target. The traditional notions had become clich6s by the time Swift invented his word-machine and the following passage is quoted from Swift's Tritical Essay on the Faculties of the Mind to link the two:

how can the Epicureans Opinion be true, that the universe was formed by a fortuitous Concourse of Atoms; which I wilt no more believe then that the accidental Jumbling of the Letters of the Alphabet, could fall by Chance into a most ingenious and learned Treatise of Philosophy. ~

Undoubtedly, Epicureanism is an element in the complex image represented in the word-machine. Even so, it can be argued that the extra- ordinary eclecticism manifested in Swift's scientific satires 6 has led to something more than a satirised clich6. Ehrenpreis points out that Swift had the clich6 at hand when he described the word machine and he assum- ed that educated readers would supply the reference for themselves. No contemporary seems to have commentated on such an obvious reference, nor on the self-evident fact that Swift's eyes were firmly fixed on satiris- inglanguage schemesper se, insofar as they were predicated on mechanical methods and universal applications. None of the figures mentioned in the tradition (Plate, Aristotle, Lucretius, Bentley) connect with the mechanical nature of Swift's image, and none suggests a diagrammatic source. The degree of inventiveness shown in Swift's word-frame was, of course, well within Swift's imaginative reach: yet this is only one item in a series of projects which accelerates from universal languages and linguistic reforms, into cryptology and the sordid world of political intrigueL The first question then is whether Swift's linguistic satires in these two chapters are deliberately random and unconnected, selected to satirise linguistic projectors for mad fertility of invention, or whether there is a basis and model for their connection which Swift could have known about.

In 171t, with the frustrations of A Taleofa Tub's hostile critical recep- tion behind him, Swift was at a low ebb. He wrote to Archbishop King, his ecclesiastical superior in Ireland, to express the purposeless gloom of "a man floating at sea" 8. King replied rather gracelessly that his subaltern could find appropriate inspiration for his talents in John Wilkins' Gift of PreachingL It was not a tactful suggestion. Wilkins is chiefly known as one of the founders of the Royal Society (a subsequent target of Swift's) and author of The Discovery of a World in the Moone (1638), and the

Clive T. Probyn - Swift and Linguistics etc. 427

Essay Towards a Real Character and Philosophical Language (1668). The former had been slightingly referred to in Temple's Thoughts Upon Reviewing An Essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning, edited and published by Swift in 1701. Temple's reference was in itself a sufficient prompt for Swift's own derogatory image of Wilkins in The Battle of the Books, where he is made joint leader with Regiomontanus of the Modern Engineers. The significance of this partnership has been underestimated. Swift was, of course, on the lookout for any kind of supporting evidence to validate his attack on modern experimental science. But one clue to the prominent rank which Wilkins enjoys in the Battle (with Regio- montanus) is suggested by a passage in Wilkins' Mathematical Magic: Or, the Wonders that may be performed by Mechanical Geometry (1648 and 1680). In the second volume, entitled Daedalus, or Mechanical Motions, Wilkins gives a credulous account of various schemes for self-propelled flying automata, including the wooden dove made by Archytas and the wooden eagle and iron fly constructed by Regiomontanus (i.e. Jonathan Mailer, the German mathematician and astronomer). Such absurdities, to Swift, hardly needed distortion to render them comic; but the point here is that far from being Swift's homiletic guide, as King had suggested, John Wilkins was, by 1704, firmly and prominently established in the satirical pantheon of Modern exponents of misguided mechanistic ventures.

For the Royal Society, however, Wilkins' reputation rested above the reach of satire's sacrilegious hands. His Real Character and Philosophical Language outlined a system of symbols and letters representing categories of things and ideas, described by one modern commentator as the culmina- tion of thirty years of attempts to formulate a "notation which would comprehend the whole of human knowledge, divided into conceptual classes, each symbol unambiguously indicting the properties of the object symbolised, and possessing its own standard pronunciation. ''1~ Its argumentative or philosophical mode may have been known to Swift, and it has been briefly noted as a possible reference for Swift's satire on such schemes. 11 Unlike the Real Character, however, one of Wilkins' earlier and preparatory works supplies a comprehensive analogue, both in discursive mode and topical range, for all of the Lagadian schemes wit- nessed by Gulliver. In 1641 Wilkins published Mercury, Or the Secret and Swift Messenger, Showing, How a Man may with Privacy and Speed communicate his Thoughts to a Friend at any D&tance (second edition 1694; third in 1707; and reprinted in collected works of 1708). In a bibliography of cryptology this is described as "the most important of early works on cryptography. ''~2 In chapter XIII Wilkins argues the familiar case for stressing the denotative reference of language in the Baconian context of reset verba~L Under the title "Concerning an universal character, that may be legible to all nations and languages", Wilkins suggests:

428 Clive T. Probyn - Swift and Linguistics etc.

L m mmmmm |EU iiiiiiiiiUNiU iii d l l i m n n i i l l i l n l l U l l l l l l i i l m g M N I I l l l g g i i m i i N i i g m i n l i l l U l N n l l n l l l l l n U l n l l mHmqmwwmmnmmmmwnmnmmm Hmmwmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm wmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmwmmummm mmmmmmmmmmmmmnmwmmmwmmm mmmmmmmHmmmmwmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmwmmmmmmmmwmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmMmmmmwMmmmmm mmmmwmmmmmmmummmmmwmmmmm wmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmwmmmmmm ummmmmmmmmmmmumwmmmmRm mmmmmmmmmmmmmqummmRmmm mmmmHmmmmmmmwmmumwmmMm mmmmwmmmmmmmmmmmwmmnmwm mmmmmmmmmmmmmwmmmmmwmmnm mmmmummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Fig. 1. II, 23.

The Mathematical and Philosophical Works o f John Wilkins, 2 vols. (1802),

if there were an universal character to express things and notions, as might be legible to all people and countries, so that men of several nations might with the same ease both write and read it, this invention would be a far greater advantage in this particular, and mightily conduce to the spreading of all arts and sciences: because that great part of our time which is now required to the learning of words, might then be employed in the study of things. 14

In t he f i f th c h a p t e r o f G u l l i v e r ' s T h i r d V o y a g e the L a g a d i a n e q u i v a l e n t

is t hus jus t i f i ed :

An Expedient was therefore offered, that since Words are only Names for Things, it would be more convenient for all Men to carry about them such Th#zgs as were necessary to express the particular Business they are to discourse o n . . .

Another great Advantage proposed by this Invention, was, that it would serve as an universal Language to be understood in all eivilised N a t i o n s . . . And thus, Embassadors would be qualified to treat with foreign Princes or Ministers of State, to whose Tongues they were utter Strangers. 15

T h e para l le l s b e t w e e n these t w o passages a re c lose e n o u g h to sugges t


that Swift's knowledge of universal language planning was something more than casual. The same argumentative pattern, the same terms and parallel justifications are used in an identical context. If, however, the ideas themselves were commonplace to anyone familiar with the subject, they were familiar to Swift for the same reason. The provenance of Swift's satirical scheme in Wilkins, the most famous universal linguist, is strongly circumstantial.

Having dealt with secret inks and papers (cf. Swift's use of edible paper and the use of ink "composed of a Cephalick Tincture"), Wilkins refers in Mercury to cryptographical communications. He reproduces a device (from Cryptomenytices et Cryptographie 16) for conveying secret messages by the use of a framework of knotted strings (figure 1):

The manner of performing it is thus: let there be a square piece of plate, or tablet of wood like a trencher, with the twenty-four letters (of the alphabet) described on the top of it, at equal distances, and after any order that may be agreed upon before-hand; on both the opposite sides let there be divers little teeth, on which the string may be hitched or fastened for its several returns...

Where the string is supposed to be fastened by a loop on the first tooth, towards the letter A, and afterwards to be drawn successively over all the rest. The marks upon it do express the secret meaning; Beware of this bearer, who is sent as a spy over you. 16

Both Wilkins' device and Swift's word-machine have a f ramework in common (of strings in the one, of wires and blocks in the other); both have an arbitrary (but in Wilkins a pre-arranged) sequence of letters of words which substitute apparent disorder for conventional sequence. The raison d'dtre of Wilkins' machine is the conveyance of secret messages, and there is no direct parallel in Swift's machine (which shows that a language machine programmed by idiots will only produce unintelligible fragments of meaning). The secrecy in the former is intelligently formed, in the latter it is hieratic, as unintelligible to its originators as to its recipients. In the next chapter of the Third Voyage, however, Swift em- ploys in Lagado symbols, acrosticks and anagrams precisely in the Wil- kins way for concealing political messages. Swift refers to the devices " a lame dog, an Invader"; "Gou t , a High Priest"; " the Tour" (specific details evoking the trial of Atterbury, and the code-name of Bolingbroke). Mercury (p. 90) recommends the use of individual capital letters for concealing secret information: Swift has N stand for a Plot, B for a Regiment of Horse, L for a Fleet at Sea. Swift's anagram Our Brother

Tom has jus t got the Piles is a perfect example of the sort of anagram recommended by Wilkins, in spite of its coarse nature - "Resist , - a Plot is brought home - The Tour".

Elsewhere in Mercury Wilkins argues for the abbreviation of language in order to facilitate rapid communication. He states (p. 55):

there must be as many several characters as there are primitive words. To which purpose the Hebrew is the best pattern, because that language consists of fewest radicals.


The first project Gulliver sees

was to shorten Discourse by cutting Polysyllables into one, and leaving out Verbs and Participles; because in Reality all Things imaginable are but Nouns. is

Such parallels could be added to. It is perhaps sufficient that Wilkins' representative proposals include all the language schemes which are distort- ed in Swift's Academy: universal language, a framework for concealing and revealing secret or mysterious meanings, and political codes, as well as some general points connected with language reform. Yet, it may b e argued, the parallels with Swift's machine are not conclusively linguistic in their origin. Certainly, Swift's complex image is given a detailed and careful description. In the last voyage Gulliver announces that he had from his youth " a great Facility in learning Languages", and was presumably also interested in the techniques of language acquisition. He describes the word-machine as composed of "several Bits of Wood, about the bigness of a Dye", and its operation by a Professor and forty Pupils. The pedagogic context is significant. Johnson's Dictionary partially quotes a usage from Isaac Watts's book The Improvement of the Mind: Or, A Supplement to the Art of Logic (1741), to illustrate the word die:

Some young creatures have learnt their letters and syllables, and the pronouncing and spelling of words, by having them pasted or written upon many little flat tablets or dies. Some have been taught vocabularies of different languages, having a word in one tongue, written on one side of these tablets, and the same word in another tongue on the other side of them. ~0

The obvious sense of die as dice connotes the random element of chance which admirably suits Swift's purpose to satirise the Lagadian professor's hope that the hitherto concealed universal truths of life will emerge without human intervention. The pedagogical context of die dearly fits the academic satire and probably indicates the tradition from which elements of Swift's machine derive. Swift appears to have combined linguistic and pedagogic strands in an Epicurean context. With Watts's example of a language-learning device, drawn from a supplement on a book on logic, we have broached several cognate areas of seventeenth-century intellectual history.

Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) in part explores alternative educational methods to those represented by his phrase "Lat in and Learning". In particular, Locke deplored the domination of logic in the schools, and specified Burgersdicius' Institutiones Logicanum (1626) and Scheibler's Philosophia Compendia, a Latin text on logic, metaphysics, physics, geometry, astronomy and optics (6th. edition 1639). Locke's essay substitutes criteria of usefulness and practicality and maintains that the education of the young should be made a pleasur- able process of discovery. One of his pedagogic alternatives is a way of cozening children into literacy invented by "a Person of great Quality"

Clive 7". Probyn - Swift and Linguistics etc. 431

which Locke thought could not be bettered for its teaching efficiency. The inventor,

who by pasting on the six Vowels (for in our Language Y is one) on the six sides of a Die, and the remaining eighteen Consonants on the sides of three other Dice; has made this a Play for his Children, that he shall win who at one cast, throws most Words on these four Dice; whereby his eldest Son, yet in Coats, has play' d himself into Spelling with great eagerness and without once having been chid for it, or forced to it.

The Letters pasted upon the sides of the Dice, or Polygon, were best to be of the size of the Folio Bible to begin with, and none of them Capital Letters, when once he can read what is printed in such Letters, he will not long be ignorant of the great o n e s . 2 2

Swift's word-machine is a sophisticated version of this language- learning device invented for children, but with one cruel refinement:

These Bits of Wood were covered on every Square with Paper pasted on them, and on these Papers were written all the Words of their Language in their Moods, Tenses, and Declensions, but without any Order. ~1

In Swift's expanded and fully mechanised version the pupillary trust of the young Lagadian scholars in their mentors is beguiled. Their device for accumulating and methodizing knowledge is a beginner's toy which lacks precisely that element of a communicable, rational order and intelligibility which educational and linguistic thinkers alike were both searching for. I f we look again at Wilkins' Real Character we shall find directions fo r" the more easie Learning" of his notation for "Rad i ca l s . . . Integrals and Particles" using precisely the device which Locke promotes and which Swift distorts in a linguistic context:

the reducing of the Learning of this Character to a Game, may be a special help and furtherance to it. In order to which it were not difficult to show, how it might be brought into several Games, like to those either at Dice or Cards. Of the former of which I had once thought to have given an Instance, with relation to the Particles, by which it would be easie to understand how the like might be done for all the rest: But upon second thought I do at present forbear it. ~z

Swift, it seems, did not forbear. He grabbed the satirical opportunity which the serious linguist (wisely perhaps) had declined and out-universa- ised the universal linguist: the Lagadian machine shows words in all

their tenses and moods, contains the "whole Vocabulary" and represents "the strictest Computation of the general Proportion there is in Books between the Numbers of Particles, Nouns, and Verbs, and other Parts of Speech." With malicious delight Swift pillories the projector's intellig- ence by evoking the image of infant education, just as later on he explains the failure of other sophisticated schemes by "the Perverseness of Lads". The machine itself avoids ambiguities of meaning by having no coherent meaning at all, and as an image it is a composite reflection of devices suggested in the cognate areas of language planning and practical

manuals on education. "Educated" readers would indeed have picked


up the reference for themselves. But so would the more learned, for in essence the idea of using mechanical devices for language teaching was at least as old as Quintil ian's Institutio Oratoria, which provides perhaps the authoritative link between pedagogy and mechanical learning devices to which the examples in Wilkins, Locke, Molyneux, Swift and Watts all refer:

I am not satisfied with the course . . , of teaching small children the names and order of the letters before their shapes. Such a practice makes them slow to recoguise the letters, since they do not pay attention to their actual shape, preferring to be guided by what they have already learned by rote. It is for this reason that teachers, when they think they have sufficiently familiarised their young pupils with the letters written in their usual order, reverse that order or rearrange it in every kind of combination, until they learn to know the letters from their appearance and not from the order in which they occur. It will be best therefore for children to begin by learning their appearance and names just as they do with men. The method, however, to which we have objected in teaching the alphabet, is unobjectionable when applied to syllables. I quite approve on the other hand of a practice which has been devised to stimulate children to learn by giving them ivory-letters to play wi th . . . As soon as the child has begun to know the shapes of the various letters, it will be no bad thing to have them cut as accurately as possible upon a board, so that the pen may be guided along the grooves. Thus mistakes such as occur with wax tablets will be rendered impossible. ~4

Finally, one term in Swift 's eclectic image, frame, may also be related to seventeenth-century linguistics. In the diagrammatic and methodologi- cal sense the term is embedded in the work of the linguists. Wilkins uses the term frequently, bo th in the Real Character and Mercury. A descrip- tive context which encloses the Lagadian schemes is found in Francis Lodwick 's Ground-Work, or Foundation Laid . . . For the Framing of a New Perfect Language, And a universal or Common Writing (1652). To turn a metaphor into a mechanical structure was a relatively simple exercise for Swift: in the Tale, The Battle of the Books and The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit he proved himself a vir tuoso in the art. His linguistic satires are no exception.

I I

Schemes for a logically constructed universal language are coterminous neither with Wilkins nor Swift. Aristotelian logic no t only served as the epistemological basis for speculative linguists such as Wilkins, but also provided a terminological source for " n e w " grammarians , for late seventeenth-century phi losophy on the nature o f man, and for Swift 's four th voyage in Gulliver's Travels. Because o f their c o m m o n epistemology these areas are related: Swift 's Gulliver, Yahoo and Houyhnhnm is a variat ion on a triad found in logic, grammars, speculative linguistics and philosophy. They are inevitably and to some extent inextricably interconnected. The contiguity o f logic, g rammar and phi losophy was a fact o f Swift 's educat ional background :


Despite the fact that the Renaissance had set up new ideals of learning, the tmiversity curriculum in the seventeenth century was still based upon the medieval system. The accepted course was in effect the seven Liberal Arts of antiquity, though the balance of studies had somewhat changed. The Trivium and Quadrivium had included Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic or Dialectic, Arithmetic, Music and Astronomy, to which were added the Three Philosophies . . . natural, moral, and metaphysical. Aristotle was the teacher of supreme authority. Logic was the most engrossing subject. 25

In 1962 R. S. Crane loca ted some o f the t e rmino logy Swift used in Gul l iver ' s four th voyage in " t he o ld-fashioned tex tbooks in logic tha t still domina ted the teaching of tha t subject in Brit ish universi t ies dur ing the la ter seventeenth century and ear ly e ighteenth century. ' '26 In such logics Swift could have found the t r ad i t iona l defini t ion o f m a n Homo est animal rationale, Nullus homo est irrationalis. In the Po rphyr i an logic o f a Tr in i ty College tutor , Narcissus Marsh ' s lnstitutio logicae, he could have found the aposto l ic n a m e s Joannes, Petrus, Thomas which he la ter adop ted in a famous let ter to Pope descr ibing Gulliver's Travels. The terms are here used to dis t inguish Swift 's " h a t r e d " o f species Man and large definable groups f rom his " l o v e " o f ind iv idua l men :

I have ever hated all Nations professions and Conmmnityes and all my love is towards individuals for instance I hate the tribe of Lawyers, but I love Councellor such a one, Judge such a one for so with Physicians (I will not speak of my own trade). Soldiers, English, Scotch, French; and the rest but principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I hartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth. This is the system upon which I have governed myself many years (but I do not tell) and so I shall go on till I have done with them. I have got Materials Towards a Treatis proving the Falsity of that Definition animal rationale; and to show that it should be only rationis capax. Upon this great foundation of misanthropy. . , the whole building of my Travells is erected. 27

Thus unl ike his c rea tor Gul l iver comes to loa the no t only the species Man (eventual ly he prefers the c o m p a n y o f horses because they seem more like the ra t iona l H o u y h n h n m s he once knew), bu t also individual ly excellent Man (his t rea tment o f the samar i tan D o n Pedro is consciously contempt ible) . The or ig inal source, as opposed to the der ived versions, for the dis t inct ions Swift makes in his let ter and Gul l iver fails to make in his Travels is precisely Aris to te l ian . In the Categoriae dis t inct ions are m a d e between genus, species and ind iv idua l which domina te the logics o f Swift 's t ime (Crane notes those o f Porphyry , the Isagogue; Burgers- dic ius ' Institutionum Logicarum, 1626; and in Marsh ' s univers i ty text- book) . The passage f rom Aris to t le which is o f mos t po in ted reference to Gul l iver ' s s i tua t ion has not, so far as I can discover, been quoted in this context :

Look also to see whether the resemblance be that of a caricature, like the resemblance of a monkey to a man, whereas a horse bears none: for the monkey is not the more handsome creature despite its nearer resemblance to man. Again, in the case of two things, if one is more like the better thing while another is more like the worse, then that is likely to be better which is more like the better. This too, admits of an objection: for quite possibly the one only slightly resembles the better, while the other strongly

434 Clive 7". Probyn - Swift and Linguistics etc.

resembles the worse, e.g. supposing the resemblance of Ajax to Achilles to be slight, while that of Odysseus to Nestor is strong. Also it may be that the one which is like the better type improves upon it: witness the likeness of a horse to a donkey, and that of a monkey to a man.

. . . if Man be better than Horse, then also the best Man is better than the best horse. Also, if the best in A be better than the best in B, then also A is better than B. without qualification; e.g. if the best man be better than the best horse, then also Man is better than Horse without qualification. 2s

Gulliver, o f course, needs Aristotle's perception. Even so, one could hardly find a more precise description of the situation confronting Gulliver and of the false logical process by which Gulliver achieves misanthropy. In rejecting the species Man on the evidence of a caricature analogy (Yahoo), he must then reject all individual men. Indeed, charges of Swift's own misanthropy will arise in.direct proport ion to the extent of ignorance of his Aristotelian source. Gulliver confronts a caricature of reality. The etymology of Houyhnhnm is the Perfection of Nature, not merely the perfection of the horse species; Gulliver sees the Yahoos as in no substantial way different f rom the species Man or from himself as an individual Man. In Houyhnhnmland the usual man-horse relationship is not o n l y inverted but exaggeratedly caricatured~L In chapter two the Master Horse compares Gulliver with a Yahoo, and Gulliver reports:

My Horror and Astonishment are not to be described, when I observed, in this abominable Animal, a perfect human Figure; the Face of it indeed was flat and broad, the Nose depressed, the Lips large, and the Mouth wide.. . The Forefeet of the Yahoos differed from my Hands in nothii~g else, but the length of the Nails, the Coarseness and Bro~amess of the Palms, and the Hairiness on the Backs . . . ftae same in every Part of our Bodies, except as to Hairiness and Cotour, which I have already described. 3~

From a man once proud of his reason Gulliver has become a creature capable of reason but unable to distinguish the essentially human f rom the accidentally animal. Just as Swift dramatises a cultural debate between the Ancients and the Moderns by allowing the actual books to sprout limbs and bear armour (in The Battle of the Books), so in Gulliver's Travels he has based an imaginative fantasy on the reification of Aristotle's logical analogies. The result is a grotesque and vexing syllogism, in which Gulliver is the undistributable middle term.

The logic-books which Swift could have known were much concerned with the necessary distinctions to be drawn between genus, species, individual and difference. They often use the man-horse comparison in syllogistic form. One example is typical. Thomas Good ' s A Brief Tract of Logick (t677: based on Brerewood's Elementary Logick of 1614) is almost entirely devoted to the variations on this one theme: Homo non est Equu~v, or nullus Homo est Equus; Nullus Homo est Equus; Ergo, Nullus Equus est Homo, and the following example is given to show


how every proposition is one of five types (genus, species, differentia, proprium, accident):

Petrus est Animal; Animal is the Genus, or the Common Kind of Peter: for if you ask what kind of creature Peter is, 1 answer he is an Animal or sensitive Creature. Petrus est Homo; homo is the Species or the special Kind of Peter: Petrus est rationalis; rationalis is the Difference by which Peter is distinguished from a Beast which is unreasonable: Petrus est risibilis; risibilis is the Propriety of Peter, for it is only Proper to Man to laugh. 31

Gulliver and his creator might not have cared much for the "o ld" Aristotelian logic: but neither could have escaped its influence. I f the educated readers among the first readers of Gulliver's Travels had forgotten everything they never knew about Aristotelian logic, there were two fields in which his influence was as strong as ever. Interaction between the new breed of speculative linguists and the old logical distinctions is illustrated by Wilkins' Mercury (p. 55: the topic is universal language):

In the reading of such a writing, though men of several countries should each of them differ in their voices, and pronouncing several words, yet the sense would still be the same. As it is in the picture of a man, a horse or a tree; which to all nations do express the same conceit, though each of these creatures be stiled by different names, according to the difference of languages.

I f the old logicians were dominated by Aristotle, then the new grammarians and some recent moral philosophy showed no astounding originality in their distinctions. Grammars used the triad man, horse, tree to illustrate types of noun distinctions: genus, species and individual. Ben Jonson's The English Grammar (1640) used the series; Locke, in his controversy with Stillingfteet in the 1690's used the series Man, Horse, Drill (i.e. baboon); James Greenwood's schooltext An Essay towards a Practical Rational Grammar (1711), Ward's Essay on Grammar (1711), Gildon and Brighthead's Grammar of the English Tongue . . . all used the same triad. Thomas Stackhouse, in Reflections on the Nature and Property o f Lan- guages (1731) used the variation " A Monkey is more like a Man than an Ox, and yet it is no less a Brute Animal than the Ox." Lodwick's book, already mentioned, links Man and Peter, Horse and Thomas in his chapter " O f Nouns". James Shirley, in the Essay Towards An Universal and Ratio- nal Grammar (issued twice in the year of Gulliver's Travels' publication) combines the grammatical triad with two of the apostolic names used by Swift in his letter to Pope (1725): " M a n is one Kind of Thing: Peter is one of that Kind, distinguish'd from John another, James another" (pp. v-vi). Swift's own versions in the letter to Pope and in the Fourth Voyage thus belong to a continuing tradition which serviced and was absorbed into contemporary grammars.

One recent seventeenth-century episode in the tradition has been seen as an influence on the Fourth Voyage: the voluminous and sometimes


irascible debate between John Locke and Edward Stillingfieet, Bishop of WorcesterZL The passages which discuss the nature of man illustrate the indistinct boundaries between man, horse and drill by discussing their names. Locke's reply to the Bishop's claim that "the Nature of a Man is equally in Peter, James and John" is:

That's more than I know: Because I donor know what Things Peter, James and John are. They may be Drills or Horses, for ought I know; as well as Weweena, Cuchipe and Cousheda, may be Drills, as his Lordship says, for ought he knows. For I know no Law of Speech that more necessarily makes these three Sounds, Peter, James and John, stand for three Men; that Weweena, Cuchipe and Cousheda, stand for three Men: For I know a Horse that was called Peter; and I do not know by the Master of the same Team might call other of his Horses, James and John. zz

Locke becomes at times impatient with the Bishop's bafflement in the face of his distinctions, which he could fairly assume had by now become commonplace in the training of an educated person. It would seem that Locke's queer names (which like Swift's terms Yahoo and Houyhnhnm are selected because they have no a priori connotations of humanity) effectively masked the Aristotelian provenance. In the event the Bishop chooses non-Aristotelian terms (Bucephalus and podargus: respectively, the mount of Alexander and a type of bird) to continue the controversy. As if to enforce the terminological m61ange which related philosophy and grammar, James Buchanan's British Grammar (1762) links the new terms in a linguistic hybrid:

Are the Words Man, Woman, proper or common Names? They are common, because they belong to all of a Kind; for every Man is called a Man, and every Woman is called a Woman, but every Man is not called James, nor every Woman Mary.

Are the Words Horse, Dog, Ship, River, proper or common Names? They are common; for every Horse is called a Horse, and every Dog is called a Dog, and every Ship is called a Ship, And every River is called a River.

Are the Words Bucephalus, Turk, Terrible, Thames, proper or common Names? They are proper, because they belong to some individual or particular ones of a Kind: for every Horse is not called Bucephalus, nor every Dog Turk, nor every Ship Terrible, nor every River Thames. 34

The certain tones of the pedagogue have finally submerged the frisson of intellectual vexation which accompanied Swift's manipulation of the terms in a fantastic moral context. To a man who had recollected the grammar of his youth and the logic of his scholastic mentors Gulliver's Travels would doubtless seem a sophisticated form of an old syllogism to which there were standard solutions. But Swift has covered his tracks well. His indirect references to the Aristotelian logic increase rather than diminish the imaginative and intellectual force of his writing, for they arise from cognate and mutually vitalising areas of contemporary thought. In the third voyage the linguistic references in Lagado are clear enough; yet the Fourth Voyage is not without direct allusion to a popular choice


for a universal language, for Gulliver observes of the Houyhnhnms that their "Language expressed the Passions very well, and the Words might with little Pains be resolved into an Alphabet more easily than the Chi- nese" (IV.i) 85. Gulliver's linguistic tragedy is also his perceptual weak- ness: his interest in speculation has been allowed to displace the elementary logic of his youth. He is the Aristotelian type who "needs perception". As in his scientific satires, so in his language satire, "Swift carries a real experiment only one step f u r t h e r . . , and the added step carries us over the precipice of nonsense. ''~6 Ironically, the Aristotelian wisdom which Gulliver had suppressed and which could have saved him from his perceptual tragedy persisted, although transmuted into another context, until the end of the century. Wordsworth's impatience with merely formal distinctions between verse and prose is pointed with a rhetorical question: "Why trouble yourself about the species till you have previous- ly decided upon the genus? Why take pains to prove that an Ape is not a Newton when it is self-evident that he is not a man? ''87

University o f Lancaster CLIVE T. PROBYN

Notes

1. See A. E. Case, Four Essays on "Gulliver's Travels" (1938); Irvin Ehrenpreis, The Personality of Jonathan Swift (1958), pp. 50-58; M. W. Buckley, "Key to the Language of the Houyhnhnms in Gulliver's Travels", in Fair Liberty was all his Cry, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (1967), pp. 270-278. Place of publication London, except where otherwise indicated.

2. "The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the History of Ideas", Reason and Imagina- tion: Studies in the History of ldeas, 1600-1800, ed. J. A. Mazzeo (1962), pp. 231-253.

3. Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis, 14 vols. (Oxford, 1939-68), XI, 166-76. All references are to this edition, as Prose Works.

4. "Four of Swift's Sources", MLN, LXX (1955), 98-100 and note 4. For a commen- tary on Swift's satire of Epicureanism, see Miriam K. Starkman, Swift's Satire on Learning in "A Tale of a Tub" (Princeton, 1950), pp. 30-44.

5. Ehrenpreis, art. cit., p. 100. 6. See Marjorie Nicolson and Nora M. Mohler, "Swift's Flying Island in the

Voyage to Laputa", Annals of Science, 3 (July 1937), p. 423 and passim.

7. Swift's poem Upon the Horrid Plot (1722) refers to the Atterbury trial: .'His Correspondence plainly dated, Was all decypher'd and translated." Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 3 vols (Oxford, second edition, 1958), I, 300. For an excellent argument in favour of the contemporaneity of Swift's reference to the Attersbury trial, see Edward Rosenheim, "Swift and the Atterbury Trial", The Augustan Milieu: Essaysprexented to Louis A. Landa, ed. H. K. Miller (Oxford 1970), 174-224.

8. Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams 5 vols. (Oxford, 1963-5), I, 259-63

9. I.e. A Discourse Concerning the Gift of Prayer. . . whereunto may be added Eccle- siastes; or, A Discourse concerning the Gift of Preaching (1646), which recommended a plain style of pulpit oratory, without rhetorical flourishes.

10. Vivian Salmon, "Language Planning in Seventeenth-Century England; Its Context and Aims", In Memory ofJ. R. Firth, ed. C. Bazell and others (1966), p. 370


Exponents of universal language schemes included Bacon, Wilkins, Dalgarno, Lod- wick, Newton, Petty and Seth Ward.

11. Paul Turner, in the edition cited above, suggests the Real Character as a possible reference (see p. 351, note 32). Mr. J. C. Maxwell kindly sent me a manuscript note which illustrates Turner's note from the Real Character: Lewis Walker, "A Possible Source for the Linguistic Projects in Lagado, "notes a parallel between Wilkins' forty ,'Genus's" and the forty-handled machine in Lagado (N& Q, XX, 11,413-4).

12. Joseph S. GaUand, An tIistorieal and Analytical Bibliography of Cryptology, Northwestern Studies in the Humanities, No. 10 (Evanston, 1945), p. 201. Swift has an entry (p. 177) as "showing clear evidence in part three of Gulliver's Travels of a familiarity with anagrams and anagram writing." Dr. John Wallis was the leading English cryptologist.

13. For a brief discussion of this complex debate, see A. C. Howell, "Reset Verba; Words and Things", ELH, 13 (1955), 131-142. Wilkins is unaccountably omitted from the list Howell gives of classical and seventeenth-century viewpoints. See also Vivian Salmon, "The Works of Francis Lodwick (1972), pp. 72-82. In The Advancement of Learning Bacon had stated that the "study of words and not matter" was "the first distemper of learning."

14. The h4athematicat and Philosophical Works o f John Wilkins, 2 vols. (1802) II, 54. The claim is repeated in the Real Character.

15. Prose Works, XI, 169, 170. Wilkins' Real Character, Epistle Dedicatory, adduces a similar justification; that such a scheme would facilitate "mutual Commerce amongst the several Nations of the World, and the improvement of all Natural Knowledge." George Dalgarno's A General and Rarional Grammar is justified by the claim that "it will unite the Na t ions . . . by a more familiar and frequent intercourse and commerce". See Vi~San Salmon, art. cir., p. 378.

16. By Gustavus Selenus (i.e. August II, Duke of Braunschweig Ltmeberg), published in 1624: see p. 405. This lavish work on cryptology includes several frames: the device on p. 308 shows a code system using lettered blocks.

17. Works of Wilkins, I, 22-3. For Swift's word-machine, seeo Prose Works XI, 167.

18. Gulliver's Travels, ed. Paul Turner, pp. 352-3.

19. Wilkins' work suggests other parallels with Swift's scientific sath-es. Mercury (P. 70) comments: "it would be a mad thing for a man to endeavour to catch the sun-beams, or inclose the light", One Laputian projector "had been Eight Years upon a Project for extracting Sun-Beams out of Cucumbers" and told Gulliver that "he should be able to supply the Governors Gardens with Sun-Shine at a reasonable Rate" (Prose Works, XI, 163). Wilkins' lunary hypothesis, which suggests that moon people talk in musical terms, is paralleled by the Laputians whose "Garments were adorned with the Figures of the Suns, Moons and Stars", who are of course preoccupied with "Mathematicks and Musick."

20. The Improvement o f the Mind: Or, A Supplement to the Art o f Logick, 2 vols. (1803), II, 24. Johnson used the 8th. edition of 1745; first published in 1741. I give the full passage.

21. Prose Works, XI, 22. My italics.

22. Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), The Educational Writings of John Locke, ed. J. L. Axtell (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 257, 258. Axtell quotes a comment from William Molyneux (Works, III, 495, 12 August 1693) which approves of Locke's snggestion and describes his own version; '"Tis by writing syllables and words in print-hand, on the face of a pack of cards, with figures or cyphers adjoined to each word; by which I can form twenty several sorts of games, that shall teach children both to read and count at the same time; and this with great variety." Swift knew and admir- ed Molyaeux' work: see Prose Works, X, 62-3.

23. Real Character, p. 442. This is conveniently available as a Scolar Press facsimile (1969), in the series English Linguistics 15001800, ed. R. C. Alston. Most of my linguistic examples in the second part of this article may also be found in this series.

24. Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, Loeb Classical Library, 4 vols. (1920)


I, 33-5; and Axtell, op. cit., p. 256. It is interesting to note that Quintilian uses horse as an example of an "irrational animal" in Bk. VIII, iii, 3, 24 (see R. S. Crane, art. tit., p. 248).

25. Constantia Maxwell, A History of Trinity College Dublin, 1591-1892 (Dublin, 1946) pp. 50-51. In the Character o f Aristotle (Prose Works, V, 345), Swift comments: "He wrote upon logiek, or the art of reasoning: upon moral and natural philosophy; upon poetry, &c. and seems to be a person of the most comprehensive genius that ever lived."

26. This paragraph is condensed from Crane, art. cit., pp. 245-53. See also W. S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (Princeton, 1956). Crane quotes Locke's approval of the neglect outside the schools of "this whole Mystery of Genera and Species". The comment of Comenius is also pertinent: in A Reformation of Schooles translated by Samuel Hartlib in 1642 the author complains of "that inevitable custome, or rather disease of Scooles, whereby all the time of youth is spent in Grammatical, Rhetoricall, and Logicall toyes."

27. Correspondence, III, 193.

28. The Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford, 1928), I. Categoriae et Inter- pretatione, Bk. III 2, llVb.

29. W. E. Yeomans, in "The Houyhnhnm as Menippean Horse", Swift; Modern Judgements ed. A. Norman Jeffares (1968), pp. 258-266, uses the term burlesque to describe the distortion of the man-horse relationship. He (refreshingly) insists on the "free play of intellectual fancy and the practice of dealing with mental attitudes rather than with people as such", which is a characteristic of Menippean and Swiftian satire.

30. Prose Works, XI, 213-4; slightly condensed. 31. Pp. 23.26. My examples are limited to those not discussed in Crane's article. 32. See Rosalie L. Colic. "Gulliver, the Locke-Stillingfleet Controversy and the

Nature of Man", History of Ideas News Letter, II (1956), 58-62. In a forthcoming article in English Studies, "Man, horse and drill: Sir William Temple's Essay on Popular Discontents and Gulliver's Fourth Voyage", I have indiated a channel through which Swift could have learned of this late stage in the essentially Aristotelian debate.

33. Mr. Locke's reply to the Bishop of Worcester's Answer (1697), quoted in Colic, art. cir., pp. 59-60.

34. P. 77. James Harris, in Hermes: Or a Philosophical lnquiry Concerning Language and Universal Grammar (1751), p. 38 uses the variation Man, Horse, Dog, and on p. 82 the by now hybrid list Animal, Man, Ship, Alexander, Bucephalus.

35. Bacon, Hugo, Vossius, Wilkins (in Mercury) and others noted the suitability of Chinese for a model universal language. See Vivian Salmon, The Works of Francis Lodwick (1972) pp. 135-139. The third voyage was composed last.

36. Marjorie Nicolson and Nora M. Mohler, "The Scientific Background of Swifts Voyage to Laputa", Annals of Science, 2 (1937), p. 323.

37. Preface (I 800) to Lyrical Ballads, 1798, ed. W. J. B. Owen (Oxford, 1967) p. 177.

Swift and linguistics: The context behind Lagado and around the fourth voyage

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