He seems to have aimed at the production of an "Alphabet of Characters," which should indicate the various sounds of the voice, and he succeeded. "I thought," he says, in the preface to his book, "and still think it, theoretically, a near approach to perfection. Into this character I translated the whole of St. Matthew's Gospel, and various extracts from the _Psalms_ and other books." "With great reluctance, and not without much pain," he came to the conclusion that this system was impracticable, and he "therefore gave up the idea altogether of that character, and looked about for some other." It then occurred to him that the Roman alphabet "might be supplemented by certain marks, so as to represent all the elementary sounds;" and this resulted in his compiling an alphabet containing forty symbols, of which five--_ai_, _au_, _oi_, _ou_, and _oo_ are compounds; the remaining thirty-five are the ordinary letters, some of which have marks under them, like the dash we make under a word in writing to indicate greater force or emphasis, thus--U D Z o d z.
Having arrived at this point, he intimates his belief that his next discovery was the result of direct inspiration. "I am far from superstitious, yet I must confess, with regard to this discovery, I have long felt as though I had been no more than a mere instrument, accomplishing the will of Another; and that the direction of my thoughts, and my ultimate convictions, were only a part of the development of my own mind, enforced and controlled by some internal law, which ensured its own effects without any original exercise of my own reason. One thing is certain: I cannot tell how it was brought into my own i mind, and I have no recollection of the process which ultimately revealed to me a knowledge of the power and essential importance of the discovery."
The discovery of which he speaks is that the "success of the Philosophic [language] turned upon the proper use of two short vowels and three nasal consonants. These are the short _u_, as in faithful, and the _i_ in pin, and the consonants, _m_, _n_, and _n _ [_i.e._, _ng_]. One of these three consonants is to be found in the centre of every root of the [philosophic] language. They resemble the reed in the hautboy--they give B metallic ring in the words where they occur. They may be compared to the sound of the trumpet in a concert; the other consonants are the sound of the drum--rub-a-dub-dub."