Let Us Calculate

Often rendered in Latin as "Calculemus!", this phrase appears in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's essay The Art of Discovery (1685), where he imagined a universal symbolic language (characteristica universalis) in which all disputes could be settled by calculation rather than argument. If philosophers disagreed, they would simply sit down together, take up their pencils, and compute the answer. The vision anticipated formal logic and, in retrospect, modern computing — though Leibniz acknowledged it was an ideal never fully realisable.