A scientist can hardly meet with anything more undesirable than to have the foundations give way just as the work is finished. I was put in this posi… - Gottlob Frege

Every good mathematician is at least half a philosopher, and every good philosopher is at least half a mathematician.

This ideography is a "formula language", that is, a lingua characterica, a language written with special symbols, "for pure thought", that is, free from rhetorical embellishments, "modeled upon that of arithmetic", that is, constructed from specific symbols that are manipulated according to definite rules.

Often it is only after immense intellectual effort, which may have continued over centuries, that humanity at last succeeds in achieving knowledge of a concept in its pure form, by stripping off the irrelevant accretions which veil it from the eye of the mind.