The Next Big Thing: How the Real Character Works

Abstract

In this chapter Fleming provides a detailed examination of the system of Wilkins’s Essay towards a real character, and a philosophical language. He is keen to show that Wilkins’s great book of 1668 is not “just an essay,” but is instead a transformative device or product for the organization and communication of knowledge. Fleming explains in some detail how Wilkins’s real character works. The reader will not actually attain competence in the character, but will come to understand why it was supposed to be such a big deal in the seventeenth century. It is the real character, and not the philosophical language, that is Wilkins’s primary achievement. Fleming concludes his discussion by examining the evidence for reception and use of the character in the later seventeenth century, including evidence drawn from extant copies of the Essay. He then shows how the phenomenological space of Wilkins’s real or universal character conforms to the shapes of information, as established in the first chapter.