Rhodri Lewis's Language, Mind, and Nature is a thorough and well-researched examination of the history of artificial languages in England during the seventeenth century, concentrating principally on the movement to create a new natural philosophical language. Such a language would, by design, mirror the structure of the natural world in its grammar, ideally allowing its users both to attain a deeper understanding of nature and to produce new knowledge as a result. An impressive number of such projects were proposed or hinted at in seventeenth-century England, all based on the Aristotelian premise that, while existing human languages may be arbitrary and idiosyncratic in their expression, the notions and understanding of the world being expressed were a human universal. A properly constructed philosophical language should therefore be able to take full advantage of that universal understanding to enable seamless communication between any and all interlocutors, while also providing a fuller knowledge of the natural world for all concerned.

Lewis begins with a discussion of Francis Bacon's call for such a philosophical language, as a means of repairing the damage done to human communication and understanding in the aftermath of the Tower of Babel. A rigorous philosophical language, Bacon believed, would enable natural philosophers to make much greater strides in their scientific explorations and collaborations, ultimately allowing mankind to recover the clear, uncorrupted knowledge of nature enjoyed by Adam before the Fall. If correctly conceived, the new language would “accurately represent the natural way in which the mind perceived the world, and thereby overcome the corruptions of extant languages.” (20).

From Bacon, Lewis goes on to examine and analyze a number of subsequent attempts to realize Bacon's vision, primarily in England but including a few on the Continent as well. Focusing initially on the program for a universal reformation of education espoused by Samuel Hartlib and his circle of correspondents in the 1630s and ’40s, he then moves on to Oxford University and the “philosophy club” founded there by John Wilkins in the late 1640s, which would eventually evolve into the Royal Society of London after the Restoration of Charles II. Lewis devotes considerable attention to the most ambitious and well known of the philosophical language projects, Wilkins's An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668), and concludes with an examination of the Royal Society's many abortive attempts to revise and expand upon Wilkins's massive work. Taken thus far, Lewis's study is thorough and wide ranging, covering all of the most important works in the genre together with a number of more obscure projects. He is especially deft in discussing the many differences, disputes, and contradictions between and within the various projects and proposals and, particularly, detailing the varying philosophical and theological beliefs with which each author began and how these came to shape their ideas of language and understanding. His book is thus a fine intellectual history of the topic.

I was struck, however, that the book is a part of the Cambridge series Ideas in Context; while it is certainly rich in ideas, it seems a bit thin on context. Lewis does seek to situate the various artificial language projects within a contemporary theological background. He briefly considers the contentious quest to recover a pure and comprehensive prelapsarian knowledge of and control over nature and touches occasionally on the violent religious turmoil endemic to seventeenth-century England and Europe, in which these projects and discussions were born, although more could be done on this front. Beyond that, Lewis does little to engage with the wider political, economic, scientific, and cultural contexts, which are so vital for understanding why these discussions were important in the first place. The English civil war and Restoration are often present in the text but are never directly addressed. Other significant topics are barely mentioned, including the Thirty Years’ War; the dawn of a global British Empire; Europe's ever-expanding knowledge of and experience with the rest of the world (and its many languages); the increasing importance and dominance of a capitalist mercantile economy; the humanist fascination with the study of philology, languages, and history; and so on. Given that virtually all of Lewis's protagonists were personally involved in a number of these burgeoning concerns, it would have benefited his study to consider much more fully their impact on the artificial language program and its proponents. The one arguable exception to this pattern, chapter 4, does consider possible influences on the artificial language program from various strains of mysticism and the occult, but Lewis's point in this chapter is to show that such movements actually had little or no impact on Baconian attempts to create a philosophical language, and they are dismissed accordingly.

In sum, Lewis's book is a careful and methodical intellectual history of artificial language planning in seventeenth-century England, from which the reader can expect to learn much of value concerning the history of linguistics, epistemology, and Baconian natural philosophy during the period in question. Its failure to connect these themes to the broader history of England and Europe, however, makes it of limited interest to a general reader.