ABSTRACT
Cartesian mechanism, which subsequently proved an obstacle, was used at first, the historians tell us, as a sort of instrument of transference, and led, rather in spite of itself, from mechanical rationality to the discovery of that other rationality which is that of the living being. The constitution of a natural science in the classical age is not the effect, either direct or indirect, of the transference of a rationality formed elsewhere. The Classical age gives history a quite different meaning: that of undertaking a meticulous examination of things themselves for the first time, and then of transcribing what it has gathered in smooth, neutralized, and faithful words. The theory of structure, which runs right through natural history in the Classical age, superimposes the roles played in language by the proposition and articulation in such a way that they perform one and the same function.
