ABSTRACT
How is it that there are so many minds that are incapable of understanding mathematics? Is there not something paradoxical in this? Here is a science which appeals only to the fundamental principles of logic, to the principle of contradiction, for instance, to what forms, so to speak, the skeleton of our understanding, to what we could not be deprived of without ceasing to think, and yet there are people who find it obscure, and actually they are the majority. That they should be incapable of discovery we can understand, but that they should fail to understand the demonstrations expounded to them, that they should remain blind when they are shown a light that seems to us to shine with a pure brilliance, it is this that is altogether miraculous.
