We have seen how, in the seventeenth century, the appearance of the mathesis as a general science of order not only played a founding role in the mathematical disciplines but was correlative in the formation of various purely empiricaldomains, such as general grammar, natural history, and the analysis of wealth; these latter were not constructed in accordance with a 'model' supposedly prescribed for them by the mathematicization or mechanization of nature; they were constituted and arranged against the background of a general possibility: that which made it possible to establish an ordered table of identities and differences between representations.