Hence the form of the encyclopaedic project as it appears at the end of the sixteenth century or in the first years of the seventeenth: not to reﬂect what one knows in the neutral element of language the use of the alphabet as an arbitrary but efficacious encyclopaedic order does not appear until the second half of the seventeenth centu but to reconstitute the very order of the universe by the way in which words are linked together and arranged in space.