ABSTRACT
One of the greatest achievements of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was its classificatory impulse, evident principally in its attempt to collect together and codify knowledge. This knowledge was for the most part what would later be recognized as scientific, and indeed those of our present-day sciences that were not actually born in this century were transformed. The painstaking gathering, classifying and processing of information that we accept as scientific method became characteristic of the century, and the trial-and-error of experimentation as opposed to reliance on received authority gave new meaning to the Euclidean 'Q.E.D.'.
