As simple obedience to the commands of the Pentateuch had enabled George Boole to solve the questions which the logicians of the 19th century could not solve, it seemed probable that the writers of Scripture knew more than was commonly supposed about the normal action of the human mind. He set himself the task of making a serious study of the Laws of Thought-sequence; aided by the conversation of a Jewish friend, a teacher of Hebrew at Lincoln. In 1854 he published a book to which he gave the title, The Laws of Thought.
A strange result ensued. The author had felt obliged to show that his system was not a mere fanciful outcome of religious fervour; and, in order to do this, he had interspersed his serious analysis with exhibitions of delicate and skilful modes of extracting the legitimate consequences from masses of premises. Those who were on the look-out for a rapid method of manipulating syllogisms, were at first delighted to find their problem solved; and it is impossible to speak too highly of the generosity with which several eminent logicians did honour to the man of whom they evidently thought only as a rival in their own line. But it seems never to have occurred to them that any one could care for Logic except as a method of reasoning. They proceeded to improve the method of the book called Laws of Thought, by leaving out of it all that could throw light on the Laws of Thought-Sequence!
Mr. Stanley Jevons earned a wide-spread fame as the improver of Boole's method. George Boole's own version of the matter was that Mr. Jevons and he were working for totally different objects, and that no intercourse between them could be of the least use to either.
