ABSTRACT
When I was very young I indulged, like other young people, in day-dreams, but I was more fortunate than most in that some of them came true. One of my day-dreams was of receiving flattering letters from learned foreigners who knew me only through my work. The first such letter that I actually received was something of a landmark. It was from the French philosopher Louis Couturat. He had written a big book on the mathematical infinite which I had reviewed with moderate praise. He wrote to tell me that when my book on the foundations of geometry was published he was given it to review and set to work “armed with a dictionary”, for he knew hardly any English. The rest of his letter consisted of the sort of praise that I had dreamt of. I made friends with him and visited him first at Caen and then in Paris. Independently of each other, we both published books on Leibniz, I in 1900 and he in 1901. My book had suggested a quite new interpretation of Leibniz’s philosophy which I based upon a rather small number of texts. I regarded these texts as important because they made Leibniz’s system much more profound and coherent than those upon which the traditional views of that system were based. Couturat, 17without knowing of my work, went to Hanover, where the Leibniz manuscripts were kept, and found innumerable unpublished papers which established the correctness of an interpretation closely similar to mine and no longer a matter of conjecture. But after this our paths diverged. He devoted himself to advocating an international language. Unfortunately, international languages are even more numerous than national ones. He did not like Esperanto, which was the general favourite, but preferred Ido. I learned from him that Esperantists (so at least he assured me) were wicked beyond all previous depths of human depravity, but I never examined his evidence. He said that Esperanto had the advantage of allowing the word Esperantist for which Ido provided no analogue. “But yes,” I said, “there is the word Idiot” He, however, refused to have the advocates of Ido called idiots. He was killed by a lorry during the mobilization of 1914.
