 Quine’s elimination strategy  From the late 1930s, W. V. O. Quine worked on an alternative way to eliminate bound variables from first-order logic. It is plausible to assume that Schönfinkel’s goal was to find a single operator in classical logic and then to eliminate the bound variables—as he claims in Schönfinkel (1924)—rather than defining an overarching symbolic system to describe all mathematics. Nonetheless, CL was soon fused with classical logic in a more free-wheeling fashion, which resulted in an inconsistent system.