"No one has attempted a language or characteristic which includes at once both the arts of discovery and of judgement, that is, one whose signs and characters serve that same purpose that arithmetical signs serve for numbers, and algebraic quantities for quantities taken abstractly. ...since God has bestowed these two sciences on mankind, he has sought to notify us that a far greater secret lies hidden in our understanding, of which these are but the shadows. ...When I... took up logic and philosophy... I once raised a doubt concerning the categories. I said that just as we have categories or classes of simple concepts, we ought also to have a new class of categories in which propositions or complex terms themselves may be arranged in their natural order. For I had not even dreamed of demonstrations at that time and did not know that the geometricians do exactly what I was seeking when they arrange propositions in an order such that one is demonstrated from the other. ...I necessarily arrived at this remarkable thought... that a kind of alphabet of human thoughts can be worked out and that everything can be discovered and judged by a comparison of the letters of this alphabet and an analysis of the words made from them. ...I wrote a Dissertation of the Art of Combinations...published... in 1666, and in which I laid my remarkable discovery before the public. This dissertation was... such as might be written by a youth just out of the schools... not yet conversant with the real sciences. For mathematics was not cultivated in those parts; if I had spent my childhood in Paris, as did Pascal, I might have advanced these sciences earlier. ... Why... no mortal has ever essayed so great a thing—this has often been an object of wonder to me. ...these considerations should have occurred from the very first, just as they occurred to me as a boy interested in logic, before I even touched on ethics, mathematics, or physics, solely because I always looked for first principles. The true reason for straying from the portal of knowledge is... that principles usually seem dry and not very attractive... Yet I am most surprised at the failure of three men to undertake so important a thing—Aristotle, Joachim Jung, and René Descartes. For when Aristotle wrote the Organon and the Metaphysics he laid open the inner nature of concepts with great skill. Joachim Jung... is a man... of such rare judgement and breadth of mind that I cannot think of anyone, not even excepting Descartes himself, from whom a great revival of science might better have been expected, if only he had been known and supported. ...As for Descartes ...since he had aimed at his own excessive applause, he seems to have broken off the thread of his investigation and to have been content with metaphysical meditations and geometrical studies by which he could draw attention to himself. ...he did not adequately think through the full reason and force of the thing. For had he seen a method of setting up a reasonable philosophy with the same unanswerable clarity as arithmetic, he would hardly have used any way other than this to establish a sect of followers, a thing which he so earnestly wanted. For by applying this method of philosophizing, a school would from its very beginning, and by the very nature of things, assert its supremacy in the realm of reason in a geometrical manner and could never perish nor be shaken until the sciences themselves die through the rise of a new barbarism among mankind. As for me, I kept this line of thought. ...For this is what I finally discovered ...Nothing more is necessary to establish the characteristic which I an attempting, at least to the point sufficient to build the grammar of this wonderful language and a dictionary for the most frequent cases, or what amounts to the same thing, nothing more is necessary to set up the characteristic numbers for all ideas than to develop a philosophical and mathematical 'course of studies'... based on a certain new method which I can set forth... a few selected men could finish the matter in five years. It would take them only two, however, to work out by an infallible calculus the doctrines most useful for life, that is, those of morality and metaphysics."