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Voice, tense, and mood are indicated by lines of different lengths, straight or curved, crossed, hooked, looped; adverbs and conjunctions by dots or points differently arranged. Wilkins' universal character therefore means a kind of shorthand writing of his Real Language.
On the 15th September of the year 1688 a memorable year in the annals of England three ships were afloat upon the Caribbean, which in their coming conjunctions were to work out the fortunes of several persons. The first of these was Captain Blood's flagship the Arabella, which had been separated from the buccaneer fleet in a hurricane off the Lesser Antilles. In somewhere about 17 deg.
"Not so with Midias; but from the very day, he talks, he abuses, he shouts. Is there an election of magistrates? Midias the Anagyrrasian is nominated. He is the advocate of Plutarchus; he knows state secrets; the city cannot contain him." Therefore the figure asyndeton, whereby conjunctions are omitted, is highly commended by writers of rhetoric.
Comets, such as from time to time appeared, bright enough for naked eye observation, were still regarded as atmospheric phenomena, and their principal interest, as well as that of eclipses and planetary conjunctions, was in relation to astrology. Reform, however, was obviously in the air. The doctrine of Copernicus was destined very soon to divide others besides the Lutheran leaders.
The conjunctions needful to success in the enterprise were numerous; yet the Greek accepted the waiting they put him to as a trial of the Patience to which the motto pledged him. He believed in being ready. When the house was built and furnished, he drilled the Bulgarians with such particularity that the scene in the garden may be said to have been literally to order.
For these reasons we find that the earnest men of all ages have recorded the occurrence of comets, eclipses, new stars, meteor showers, and remarkable conjunctions of the planets, as well as plagues and famines, floods and droughts, wars and the deaths of great rulers. Sometimes they thought they could trace connections which might lead them to say that a comet presaged famine, or an eclipse war.
But as they are almost in everything equal to the ancient philosophers, so they far exceed our modern logicians for they have never yet fallen upon the barbarous niceties that our youth are forced to learn in those trifling logical schools that are among us. But for the cheat of divining by the stars, by their oppositions or conjunctions, it has not so much as entered into their thoughts.
Sometimes an effect is the result partly of chance, and partly of law: viz. when the total effect is the result partly of the effects of casual conjunctions of causes, and partly of the effects of some constant cause which they blend with and modify. This is a case of Composition of Causes.
Let me quote those lines in which Goethe describes how an unalterable destiny is assigned to every man at the hour of his birth, so that he can develop only in the lines laid down for him, as it were, by the conjunctions of the stars: and how the Sybil and the prophets declare that himself a man can never escape, nor any power of time avail to change the path on which his life is cast:
People, however, agree in this that conjunctions of the planets infallibly prognosticated great events; great revolutions of kingdoms, new prophets, destructive plagues, and other occurrences which bring distress and horror on mankind.
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