ABSTRACT
The organic unification of all knowledge, of metaphysics, mathematics, physics, medicine, morals and mechanics, would have people dispense with the doctrine of the classification or subalternation of the sciences and reduce substantially any interest in an order of the sciences. Modern commentators have made much of Descartes's discussion of analysis and synthesis. When the mature Descartes talks about analysis and synthesis, it does not look as if he is talking about one method, but two different things called analysis and synthesis. The 1640s is also the period in which Descartes wrote the Second Replies, containing his most detailed and lengthy assertions about analysis and synthesis, and appending a synthetic presentation of the Meditations. To think of Descartes's physics being grounded in his metaphysics as different from what a schoolman would have accepted is to think of the metaphor of the tree of philosophy from the preface of the French translation of the Principles as a peculiarly Cartesian image.
