“babies are despised.” As the century turned, Bertrand Russell paid George Boole an extraordinary compliment: “Pure mathematics was discovered by Boole, in a work which he called the Laws of Thought.” It has been quoted often. What makes the compliment extraordinary is the seldom quoted disparagement that follows on its heels: He was also mistaken in supposing that he was dealing with the laws of thought: the question how people actually think was quite irrelevant to him, and if his book had really contained the laws of thought, it was curious that no one should ever have thought in such a way
...more
