ABSTRACT
Samuel Clarke was a philosopher and theologian and also a disciple of Newton. In his Being and Attributes of God, dated 1704, Clarke had developed a proof of the existence of God. In proceeding from the world of Leibniz and the seventeenth century European nobility to that of George Boole, we move forward not only two centuries in time, but also down several layers of social class. John Boole, a cobbler who eked out only a meager living from his trade, had a passion for learning, and especially for scientific instruments. What had set him off was De Morgan's publication on logic that Hamilton claimed plagiarized what he thought of as his great discovery in logic, what he called the "quantification of the predicate." In Boole's early work, he applied algebraic methods to the objects that mathematicians call operators. These "operate" on expressions of ordinary algebra to form new expressions.
