| l: The Ars Magna of Ramon Lull ear the city of Palma, on the island of Majorca, largest of the Balearic isles off the eastern coast of Spain, a huge saddle-shaped mountain called Mount Randa rises abruptly from a monotonously level ridge of low hills. It was this desolate mountain that Ramon Lull, Spanish theologian and visionary, climbed in 1274 in search of spiritual refreshment. After many days of fasting an contemplation, so tradition has it, he experienced a divine illumination in which God revealed to him the Great Art by which he might confound infidels and establish with certainty the dogmas of his faith. According to one of many early legends describing this event, the leaves of a small lentiscus bush (a plant still flourishing in the area) became miraculously engraven with letters from the alphabets of many languages. They were the languages in which Lull's Great Art was destined to be taught. After his illumination, Lull retired to a monastery where he completed his famous Ars magna, the first of about forty treatises on the working and application of his eccentric method. It was the earliest attempt in the history of formal logic to employ geometrical diagrams for the purpose of discovering nonmathematical truths, and the first attempt to use a mechanical device-a kind of primitive logic machine-to facilitate the operation of a logic system. Throughout the remainder of Lull's colorful, quixotic life, and for centuries after his death, his Art was the center of stormy conttroversy. Franciscan leaders (Lull belonged to a lay order of the movement) looked kindly upon his method, but Dominicans tended to regard it as the work of a madman. Gargantua, in a letter to his son Pantagruel (Rabelais | |
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