Wilkins, a 17th-century philosopher, had proposed a
universal language based on a classification system that would encode a description of the thing a word describes into the word itself—for example,
Zi identifies the genus
beasts;
Zit denotes the "difference"
rapacious beasts of the dog kind; and finally
Zitα specifies
dog. In response to this proposal and in order to illustrate the arbitrariness and cultural specificity of any attempt to categorize the world, Borges describes this example of an alternate taxonomy, supposedly taken from an ancient Chinese encyclopaedia entitled
Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. The list divides all animals into 14 categories. Borges claims that the list was discovered in its Chinese source by the translator
Franz Kuhn. In his essay, Borges compares this classification with one allegedly used at the time by the
Institute of Bibliography in Brussels, which he considers similarly chaotic. Borges says the Institute divides the universe in 1000 sections, of which number 262 is about the
Pope, ironically classified apart from section 264, that on the
Roman Catholic Church. Meanwhile, section 294 encompasses all four of
Hinduism,
Shinto,
Buddhism and
Taoism. He also finds excessive
heterogeneity in section 179, which includes
animal cruelty,
suicide,
mourning, and an assorted group of vices and virtues. Borges concludes: "there is no description of the universe that isn't arbitrary and conjectural for a simple reason: we don't know what the universe is". Nevertheless, he finds Wilkins' language to be clever (
ingenioso) in its design, as arbitrary as it may be. He points out that in a language with a divine scheme of the universe, beyond human capabilities, the name of an object would include the details of its entire past and future. == Influences of the list ==