2.4 THE IDEA OF LOGICAL ANALYSIS

Llull's idea was to analyze basic concepts by associating them one to each other and see what happened. This, to him, was tantamount to penetrating the inner workings of God and nature, and so to understanding the world better (and giving an effective, objective account of it). If faith (or even mystic revelation) was reached in the process, then Llull's ultimate design purpose was accomplished, that of founding faith on reason, and of justifying beliefs through logical analysis. The originality here was that this was done in practice by mechanically executing an iterated expansion of a given set of initial beliefs (a core or "compendium" of truths) until, should the case arrive, a contradiction obtained. By postulating such a procedure Llull was in fact anticipating the modern (1955) idea of semantic tableaux. (More of this later.)