reat thinkers as to the need for an
auxiliary language:

The diversity of languages is fatal for genius and progress. If
there were a universal language, we should save a third of life.
(Leibnitz.)

The interrelationships of the peoples are so great that they most
certainly need a universal language. (Montesquieu.)

One of the greatest torments of life is the diversity of language.
(Voltaire.)

What an immeasurable profit it would be for the human race if we were
able to intercommunicate by means of one language. (Volney.)

It seems to me quite possible--probable even--than an artificial
language to be universally used will be greed upon. (Herbert
Spencer.)

The learning of many languages fills the memory with words instead of
facts and thoughts, and this is a vessel which, with every person,
can only contain certain limited amount of records. Therefore the
learning of many languages is injudicious, inasmuch as it arouses
the belief in the possession of dexterity, and, as a matter of
fact, it lends a kind of delusive importance to social intercourse.
It is also injurious in that it opposes the acquirement of solid
knowledge and the intention to win the respect of men in an honest
way. Finally, it is the ax which is laid at the root of a delicate
sense of language in our mother tongue, which thereby is incurably
injured and destroyed. The two nations which have produced the
greatest stylists, the Greeks and the French, learned no foreign
languages; but as human intercourse grows more cosmopolitan, and
as, for instance, a good merchant in London must now be able to
read and write eight languages, the learning of many tongues has
certainly become a necessary evil; but which, when finally carried
to an extreme, will compel mankind to find a remedy, and in some far
off future there will be a new language used at first as a language
of commerce, then as a language of intellectual intercourse, then
for all, as surely as some time or other there will be aviation. Why
else should philology have studied the laws of language for a whole
century and have estimated the necessary, the valuable, and the
successful portion of each separate language? (Nietsche.)

In this connection it may be well to repeat once more that Esperanto is
only an "auxiliary" language. Nobody dreams of it being a "universal
language."