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This surely is a remarkable book, and it can without any qualification be recommended for reading and even study. I only feel
bound to warn the student that he must be prepared for hard work, due to a certain extent to the difficulties of the subject itself, and to the fact that the book touches on practically all branches of science and on some even so disparate as neurology and mathematics. In addition, we are confronted from the beginning with a rich terminology, created by Count Korzybski himself (which, as may be said at once, constitutes his main scientific contribution), without being prepared with regard to its meaning and use. Count Korzybski tends to leave it to the reader to discover during the course of study the meaning of his terms. No wonder that, in spite of repeating everything several times, which accounts for the bulkiness of the volume, the author requires his reader to read it through "several times", following therein Schopenhauer, who in his preface to the Welt als Wille und Vorstellung also asks for "zweimal oder keinmal". Schopenhauer's contemporaries took the easier way of reading "keinmal". It is to be hoped that Count Korzybski's book does not meet with a similar fate.
This attribute starts with the title, over which the reader has probably already stumbled twice. To give the reader an idea of the book's objectives it is best perhaps to explain first what is meant by "non-aristotelian systems" and "general semantics". The terms "non-aristotelian" and "semantics" have been borrowed from mathematics. About thirty years ago the Dutch mathematician Brouwer was led to challenge the aristotelian law of the excluded third ("A is B, or not B"). This led to a revolution in mathematical and other basic thinking which goes under the name of "non-aristotelian logic", in the development of which a number of the author's compatriots, Polish mathematicians, played an important rôle. The "two-valued" (B, non B) logic of Aristotle was thereby