ABSTRACT
The authority of Leibniz must, however, count even less for us than that of Kant or Herbart, since he could not give to his great intentions the weight of completed achievements. He belongs to a past age, beyond which modern science feels that it has travelled a long way. Authorities do not in fact carry much weight as opposed to the broad advance of a science supposedly rich and secure in its results. Their influence must be less, in so far as they lack a sufficiently clarified, positively elaborated concept of the discipline in question. Clearly, if we do not want to stick half way, and to run the risk that our critical reflections may be barren, we must take up the task of constructing the Idea of pure logic on a sufficiently broad basis. Only in a series of meaty individual treatments, which will provide a more precise idea of the content and character of the essential logical researches, and which will work out the notion of logic more definitely, can one remove the prejudice which sees logic as an insignificant field of more or less trivial statements. As against this, we shall see that our discipline extends far and wide, not merely in respect of its content of systematic theories, but above all in regard to the difficult and important investigations needed for its philosophical foundation and assessment.
