ABSTRACT
3.1. Lull’s ‘Ars Magna’. The first step in the direction of a complete and automatic language for reasoning was taken by Ramon Lull (1235-1315) in about 1270, in his book Ars Magna (‘The Great Art’). Lull’s belief was that all knowledge in the sciences is a joining together of a number of root ideas: knowledge is a complex of simples. There were only 54 of these root ideas, about a third of them having to do with the field of religion or of theories about right and wrong behaviour. The joining together of groups of these ideas is ‘the great art’ by which scientia generalis (‘the substance of science’) is to be effected. Lull did not get much further than working out the number of ways in which complexes of these ideas might be formed. He gave no rules, or only foolish ones, for judging the value as knowledge of the different possible complexes. It seems to have been his opinion that no knowledge in the sciences has any need of sense-experience as a guide and a support, as if the discovery and the testing of the discovery of what is under the sea might be made without stepping from the land: the fishing-boats of knowledge may be kept safely and with profit in harbour and do not have to be sent sailing with their nets over the deep waters of possible experience. In 15having this opinion, Lull was representative of much of the thought of his time.
