  A number of elite thinkers in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries
pursued an agenda which historian Paolo Rossi calls the "quest for a universal
language," a quest which was deeply interwoven with the emergence of the
scientific method. From a modern perspective, one of the many surprising
aspects of these efforts is that they relied on a diverse array of memorization
techniques as foundational elements. In the case of Leibniz's universal
calculus, the ultimate vision was to create a pictorial language that could be
learned by anyone in a matter of weeks and which would contain within it a
symbolic representation of all domains of contemporary thought, ranging from
the natural sciences, to theology, to law. In this brief article, I explore why
this agenda might have been appealing to thinkers of this era by examining
ancient and modern memory feats. As a thought experiment, I suggest that a
society built entirely upon memorization might be less limited than we might
otherwise imagine, and furthermore, that cultural norms discouraging the use of
written language might have had implications for the development of scientific
methodology. Viewed in this light, the efforts of Leibniz and others seem
significantly less surprising. I close with some general observations about
cross-cultural origins of scientific thought.
