Following in the steps of a number of other teachers, Comenius sought to exploit the immediate connection made between a picture and the thing it represents in order to assist the teaching of reading in Latin and the vernacular. This had been the language that Adam had used to name the beasts in Eden (Genesis 2:19–20, quoted in English and Latin on the verso of the title-page of Orbis pictus).
One of the consequences of the confusion of tongues at Babel had been the loss of the true, original language of mankind, in which there had been a direct correspondence between words and the things that they named. The most successful of these was the Orbis pictus, which made explicit the Comenian belief that true philosophy should be grounded on a real, empirical language (that is, in a knowledge of things not of words). Catalogue no.40, pp.74–75.ĭuring the 1650s, Comenius composed several books which might serve as introductions to the Janua linguarum. John Amos Comenius, translated by Charles HooleĪn opening from Comenius’s Orbis sensualium pictus illustrating his method for teaching languages by exploiting immediate connections between words and pictures.
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