It was therefore necessary to invent a new language of pure and simple symbols, each with its own single and unambiguous meaning, or better yet to convert all experience into numerical form. "In our search for the direct road to truth," said Descartes, "we should not occupy ourselves with any object about which we are unable to have a certitude equal to that of arithmetical and geometrical demonstrations." At one time or another, the idea of a universal language was endorsed by Leibniz, Voltaire, d'Alembert, Condorcet, and Franklin, who pointed out that a universal alphabet designed by John Wilkins, secretary of the Royal Society, "could be well learnt in a tenth part of the time required to learn Latin."

The equation of truth with axiomatic and universally applicable principles could lead to skepticism just as well as to certainty. Hume took the position that scientific procedures could never answer questions pertaining to the "end of man" and concluded for that reason that such questions were not worth asking, since they would always give rise to "pretty uncertain and unphilosophical" thoughts. Like Descartes, he took it for granted that philosophy had to rest on intellectual foundations unassailable by doubt—on "principles which are permanent, irresistible, and universal." These principles, which could be gleaned only from the scientific study of nature, represented the "foundation of our thoughts and actions," without which "human nature must immediately perish and go to ruin." Everything else, Hume thought, was "changeable, weak, and irregular."

Proposals for a universal religion, conceived in the same spirit that gave rise to the project for a universal language, appealed to those who found Hume's skepticism repugnant, if not always for themselves at least for the mass of credulous common folk who presumably needed consolation and firm moral guidelines. A number of eighteenth-century intellectuals argued that religion, like language, could be synthetically constructed on scientific principles, as Helvetius put it, "that are eternal and invariable, that are drawn from the nature of men and things, and that, like the propositions of geometry, are capable of the most rigorous demonstration." Kant's search for a universal morality, a less grandiose version of the same project, entailed the same assumption: that incontrovertibility furnished the only test of socially workable beliefs. Kant did not, to be sure, subscribe to the conviction that informed the work of utilitarians like Helvetius and Bentham, that "morality ought to be treated like all

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