“A General Scheme, or Idea of the Present State of Natural Philosophy, And how its Defects may be Remedied by a Methodical Proceeding in the Making Experiments and Collecting Observations whereby to Compile a Natural History, as the Solid Basis for the Superstructure of True Philosophy.”
(Try saying that title in one breath!)
When it comes to cybernetics— Hooke was a big fan of Cornelis Drebbel who designed and built the first cybernetic system (a self regulating oven) and a functional submarine (which produced oxygen by heating saltpetre), and a compound microscope, and chemical air conditioning, and the telescope that Galileo used to find the moons of Jupiter, and a perpetual motion machine based on harvesting barometric pressure changes, and…
I'm having a Baader-Meinhof effect moment right now :)
https://www.club.cc.cmu.edu/~ajo/disseminate/leibniz.html
The letter is basically Hooke saying: "Well, I can't convince anyone but you, Leibniz, that Wilkins' Universal Character is a cool idea. I think we'll have problems figuring out the medium (i.e. what the characters look like and so on), but that should all shake out during testing. What kind of testing? Well, we need a bunch of smart people to come up with a lot of true facts in different fields, all of which we can try writing down in this language. Do you know any smart people I could brainstorm some true facts with? If you were to send me some such people, that might get the ball rolling over here."
Now, "get a bunch of smart people together with Robert Hooke to come up with true facts in a wide variety of fields" sounds suspiciously like the founding idea of the Royal Society... but in fact the Royal Society seems to have been started already about 20 years earlier ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham_College_and_the_format... ), so I guess I don't know how this letter fits into the big picture there.
FWIW, John Wilkins (the Bishop of Chester mentioned in the letter) had been dead for nine years by the time this letter was written (1681).
> I question not but Mr Leibnitz may have many of those specimens by him and therefore I doe heartily wish you could prevail wh him to Communicate some of those which would be a means to persuade severall yet incredulous of the possibility of such a Science.
I suppose it could have been written to Leibniz's personal secretary, or some such. If it weren't for all the catalog data I'd assume it was written to some close colleague of Leibniz instead. Anybody want to track down a plausible explanation/mechanism here?
While reading, I first took it to be a journal entry. The penmanship also supports this. But the second person "you" at the end is a confounding detail. A journal entry in the form of a letter to himself is possible, but doesn't seem plausible.
The word you've labelled "[deviate?]" in your copy is definitely not "deviate" in the manuscript. I'm certain that the first letter is "R", and the second to last letter probably a "d" followed by "e" (compare to "undenyable" and "persuade"). The letter following "R" could be "i", but really could be anything. It's unfortunate that it's not as straightforward as just crafting a regex and grepping at /usr/share/dict/words, because whatever Hooke meant, it's likely to be an archaic spelling. "Recede" spelled as "Ricede" works grammatically, but I don't think that's it, either.
Reminds me of Cyc.[1][2]
[1] www.cyc.com [2] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cyc
It says "the regular exercise thereof" where the scan looks to me much more like "the regular course thereof".
And -- this one is smaller but gave me more trouble -- there's a misplaced comma: it should be after "thereof", not after "intercept". (The sentence structure is a bit weird even with the comma in the right place, but having it in the wrong place makes it even more confusing.)
BTW, the lines appear about halfway down the scan.
I'm surprised it doesn't mention Leibniz's famous "Let us calculate" quote:
>>In a 1679 letter to one of his patrons, Johann Friedrich, he described his project of the universal language as “the great instrument of reason, which will carry the forces of the mind further than the microscope has carried those of sight”. Later he wrote:
>>>The only way to rectify our reasonings is to make them as tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so that we can find our error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate, without further ado, to see who is right.[1]
I'm also kind of surprised that Hooke wrote the letter in English, since I assumed all academic communication across language barriers back then would have been in Latin. But ChatGPT tells me Leibniz was unusually multi-lingual.
[1] Sorry, ad-heavy site but I wanted one that gave context: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/let-us-calculate-leibni...
And then Kurt Gödel forever permanently dashed those dreams.
He based it on the Chinese iching, interestingly enough…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series...
The episodes Faith in Numbers (1978 original series, S01E04[0]) and Thunder in the Skies (S01E06)[1] feature Robert Hooke from what I can tell from a little searching, though it’s been a while since I saw the series, so I apologize if I’m wrong on that point, though the entire series is worth watching all the same.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6yL0_sDnX0
[1] https://archive.org/details/bbc-connections-1978/Connections...
Those are the superficial signifiers, not a constructive definition of the genre.
EDIT: Presumably this is Robert Hooke as in the author of Micrographia and an early microscope
Some of this book is fantastical but the bones of it are historical fiction.
"...especially in all those subjects where use of [such a language] may be free and where interest and authority do not intercept, the regular exercise thereof which I conceive to be the great antagonists which may impede its progress..."
“Hooke had some proto-liberal views” would be a more grounded interpretation.
Precursor to De Quincy's Confessions of an English Opium Eater as axiomatic Euclidean geometry.
[1]:https://archive.org/details/confessionsofeng01dequ/page/n2/m...
