33 Genesis shows the Satanic snake flattering our first mother with falsely gorgeous hopes until, by the filching of an apple and breaking of a law, sin, sadness and new knowledge all enter the world together, the fall of man being a fall into knowledge of his own wilful divisions from Goodness.
34 Individual men are condemned to repeat this tragedy, for when suckling at the breast they will never be so purely happy again, as is testified by their blissful faces and tiny erected penes.
35 Universal history repeats this tragedy: the most notorious modern instance (which he viewed less complacently than myself) being Don Conquistadore’s disclosure that the world held two more continents than the ancients knew, which uncovery brought slaughter, slavery and the Spanish inquisition to several proud nations; and to Europe so much silver and gold that the common currency hath ever since lost value, thus placing more and more oeconomies in the hands of usurors, and bringing also to Europe that disease of the generative root which makes men rot and bleed at the centre of their most poignant desires and pleasures.
36 He ended by saying, I am no friend of ignorance, but concur with Christ and Socrates in condemning as vainglory all knowledge that does not encourage right conduct, and since a language is but an instrument conveying unto us things good to be known, should a great linguist pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet if he have not studied the solid things in them, as well as the words and lexicons, he is less truly learned than a yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother dialect only.
37 To this I responded courteously, that what he said was correct: words are indeed the instruments by which men denote things, but in being so used they become also the instruments by which we discover, and shape, and share our passions.
38 It follows from this, that a bad man cannot describe his reasons in good language without betraying himself.
39 It is inexactness of signification which permits false rhetoric to confuse causes with effects, accidents with intentions, abstracts with particulars, thereby provoking (to the corrupt rhetorician’s advantage) misled passions in the heart of the malinformed hearer, who may also pass these wrong passions to others by parroting the ear-catching phrase whereby he first received them.
40 My new speech cannot be abused in this way; liars, using it grammatically, will at once contradict themselves or place within the listener’s head ample evidence for their own speedy undoing; the greedy and vicious may not disguise their passions in it, and will be compelled to dissemble their vices under cloud of unsocial dumbness.
41 As for the variedly virtuous, the vocabulary of each will fluctuate to exactly fill the altering bounds of their experiential knowledge, growing more colourful or more austere as their passions wax or wane, but each passion clearly correlated by a thought-word to the unique state and thing which is its cause and aim.
42 Even fools will talk wisely in my new language for they will lack the materials to do otherwise.
43 He stared at me then asked sharply how such a language was devized?
44 By grammatical logarithms, said I, for each letter in my alphabet of twenty-five consonants and ten vowels, hath the value of a number linking it to a class of things (in the case of the consonants) or class of actions (in the case of the vowels).
45 The student of my language is taught very few and simple words, and these as example only, for he is given (to be metaphorickal) the bricks wherewith any word he needs may be builded, besides a grammar by which these words may be swiftly presented to the understanding of an instructed fellow.
46 This allows an educated man to bestow upon anything he encounters in the universe a name entirely different from any other, yet so intelligible that a well taught child of ten years can, from that name alone, even if it signifies a thing of which the child hath had no previous knowledge, imagine at once the form, colour, material, weight, bigness, usefulness or danger of the signified thing, and conceive it so accurately that, if the thing be artificial, the child can at once construct an accurate replica, provided only that he hath possession and mastery of the requisite tools.
47 This significant nomenclature would hugely benefit the art of wars; for if (as is the French custom) a new recruit received a nom de guerre, and it were in my new diction, so short a name as Kohudlitex or Palipugisk, whispered to a commander at a review of troops, would let him know a soldier’s rank, regiment, age, birthplace, ancestry and character, and inable him to address that man with that familiarity which inspireth true loyaltie and devotion, when manifested by the nobility toward uttered in such nonsounding things as silence, or tears.
83 I asked him for a particular example of what he meant; he said he would relate a peculiar domestic circumstance.
84 My wife’s family were of the Royal faction (said he, sighing) which I did not know at first, for her father owed mine money he was unwilling to repay, and for fear of a lawsuit (my father was a scrivener and understood the courts) he conversed only upon such topicks as did not promote disunion.
85 Indeed, my good wise father, knowing that I yearned toward matrimony, and that his debtor had a marriageable daughter, proposed an alliance which would sink the debt in a marriage settlement, which proposal was not unwelcome; so I was taken to the girl, and finding her meek mannered, without apparent defects of face and form (indeed, she was beautiful) I gladly bestowed myself upon her.
86 I was thirty-five years of age at that time, and since early youth, when it first dawned upon my developing soul that God had endowed it with no ordinary qualities, I had prepared myself to write a book which the world would not willingly let die, partly by reading everything great which preceeded me: yes, but also by the cultivation of fortitude, sobriety and chastity, for no good thing may emanate from a bad man.
87 I had conceived an Epic on the story of King Arthur, and was now sure I needed nothing to begin it but that well of constant sensible solace which is owed by a wife to the husband of her body.
88 What my wife brought me was silence; meek she had seemed and meek her manner remained, as befitted one not much more than half my age, but that meekness enclosed a cold sullen obdurate resistance which granted to my mind, heart and soul nothing.
89 Our conjoyned society was therefor mutual torture, but my torture was greater, for whether beside her or apart from her I desired her continually and hopelessly, whereas she found a little happiness in my occasional absences.
90 After a very few weeks she got a pretext for visiting her family in Oxfordshire, and refused to return from thence, being supported in this rebellion by her Royalist father and brothers (the King had just inaugurated a greater Rebellion by making Oxford his capital city, where his followers gloried in their first slight early triumphs).
91 Did I not find her departure a great relief? Oh no I did not.
92 My publick self did not suffer, I infused new vigour into my service to the Commonwealth, authoring in a brief space no less than four treatises on divorce, and one upon a general reform of education, and one defending the right of all to print what they willed: for the Pressbiters were snarling at my heels — I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs by the known rules of ancient liberty, when straight a barbarous noise environed me of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes and dogs.