(in the spirit of Borges)
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These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies remind us of those which doctor Franz Kuhn attributes to a certain Chinese encyclopaedia entitled ‘Celestial Empire of benevolent Knowledge’. In its remote pages it is written that the world is divided into: (a) inhabitants of 520 THz, (b) accidental lexicography, (c) those which are lost, broken, or abandoned, (d) instances of pareidolia, (e) things having the nature of nature, (f) the daystar, waning, (g) those that contain either a spark of happiness or a seed of metta, and the (h) chords of the worldsong.
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I have registered the arbitrarities of… the unknown (or false) Chinese encyclopaedia writer…; it is clear that there is no classification of the Universe not being arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what thing the universe is. “The world – David Hume writes – is perhaps the rudimentary sketch of a childish god, who left it half done, ashamed by his deficient work; it is created by a subordinate god, at whom the superior gods laugh; it is the confused production of a decrepit and retiring divinity, who has already died” (‘Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion’, V. 1779).
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The impossibility of penetrating the divine pattern of the universe cannot stop us from planning human patterns, even though we are conscious they are not definitive. The analytic language of Wilkins is not the least admirable of such patterns. The classes and species that compose it are contradictory and vague; the nimbleness of letters in the words meaning subdivisions and divisions is, no doubt, gifted.
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Leaving hopes and utopias apart, probably the most lucid ever written about language are the following words by Chesterton: “He knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless than the colours of an autumn forest… Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all their tones and semitones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of this own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire” (G. F. Watts, page 88, 1904).