ABSTRACT
It is almost frightening how fast the obvious of yesteryear is turning incomprehensible. An intelligent and well-educated man of the first modern generation - that of Newton, Hobbes, and Locke - might have still been able to understand and to make himself understood across the whole army of knowledge. The world-view of the modern West can be called a Cartesian world-view. Few professional philosophers during these last three hundred years have followed René Descartes, the early seventeenth-century Frenchman, in his answers to the major problems of systematic philosophy. Descartes gave to the modern world its basic axiom about the nature of the universe and its order. Descartes provided the method to make his axiom effective in organizing knowledge, and the search for it. Whatever the significance of his Analytical Geometry for mathematics, it established a universal, quantitative logic concerned with relationship between concepts, and capable of serving as universal symbol and universal language.
