Stephenson:Neal:Quicksilver:278:...truth can be grasped as if pictured on paper.(Gary Thompson)

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

Leibniz called this symbolic manipulation of statements the calculus ratiocinator. The calculus would only produce true statements. You could sit at your desk and churn out fact after fact of science, philosophy, or politics. He got as far as the principles of noncontradiction and indiscernability (two things that have the same properties are the same).

In 1930, Gödel showed the impossibility of this working for even a subset of knowledge, mathematics.