Henry Craik, ed. English Prose. 1916.
Vol. I. Fourteenth to Sixteenth Century
Bishop John Wilkins (16141672)
[John Wilkins was born at Oxford in 1614, and educated in his early years under the care of a well-known dissenter, Mr. John Dod, who was his grandfather on the mother’s side. He afterwards entered at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, and after taking his degree went abroad and became Chaplain to the Count Palatine. Joining the Parliamentary side when the Rebellion broke out, he was made Warden of Wadham in 1648, and Master of Trinity, Cambridge, in 1659, having in 1656 married Robina, sister of Oliver Cromwell, and widow of Peter French, Canon of Christ Church. On the Restoration, he was ejected from Trinity, but became Rector of St. Lawrence Jewry; and subsequently, through the help of a somewhat compromising patron, the Duke of Buckingham, he was promoted first to the Deanery of Ripon, and then to the Bishopric of Chester, in 1668. He died in 1672.
His works were numerous. In 1638, there appeared The Discovery of a New World: a Discourse to prove that there may be another habitable world in the Moon. A second part of this treats of The Possibility of a Passage to the Moon. In 1640, appeared A Discourse Concerning a new Planet: tending to prove that the Earth may be a Planet. Others of his works were Mercury, or the Secret Messenger (1641); Mathematical Magic (1648); The Principles of Natural Religion (printed after his death); and an Essay towards a Real Character and Philosophical Language. This last is a scheme for a universal language, and was written for, and published under the auspices of, the Royal Society, of which Wilkins was a devoted member.]
The characteristic of Wilkins’s thought is not profound speculation, and his prose accordingly never becomes intricate or obscure. His chief qualities are, a sort of alert curiosity, a boldness in hazarding conjectures, a determination to be fettered by no authority: and, joined with these, an absence of all hesitation, an air of absolute unconcern as to whether this or that position be true or false, so long as it is conceivably tenable, and a readiness to advance theories which is all the greater because all earnestness of feeling is so entirely wanting. Wilkins was only by accident a theologian. He was for the most part an experimental philosopher, ready and independent, but neither profound nor judicious. He represented one type of the Royal Society. He was not merely the fashionable and dilettante virtuoso: just as little was he one who could materially advance physical science, or extend her sway. He still retains the habit of introducing into his physical speculations, the miscellaneous, ill-digested, uncritical learning which his generation, or a certain section of it, loved, and which seemed an inheritance from the old days of the alchemists. It is easy to see how strong the effect of the Latin construction is upon him. He recurs, sentence after sentence, to what answers to the ablative absolute in Latin. The participle appears in almost every clause: and he seeks to impart a certain logical formality to his argument, by repeatedly following the Latin construction by which the object frequently precedes, and the subject follows, the verb. All this in Wilkins, and in others of his kind, was no doubt helping to form the later fashion of an argumentative style; but it was leading English prose further and further away from the more natural, and perhaps in a literary sense, more healthy, tendency to fix the position of a word rather by the dictates of sound and harmony, than by the exigencies of grammar or logical precision.