So that at length the Priests of Delphos being quite baffled with the railleries of those learned Wits, renounced all Verses, at least as to the spea… - Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle

The geometrical spirit is not so tied to geometry that it cannot be detached from it and transported to other branches of knowledge. A work of morals or politics or criticism, perhaps even of eloquence, would be better (other things being equal) if it were done in the style of a geometer. The order, clarity, precision and exactitude which have been apparent in good books for some time might well have their source in this geometric spirit. ...Sometimes one great man gives the tone to a whole century; <nowiki>[</nowiki>Descartes], to whom one might legitimately be accorded the glory of having established a new art of reasoning, was an excellent geometer.

Behold a universe so immense that I am lost in it. I no longer know where I am. I am just nothing at all. Our world is terrifying in its insignificance.

At the time the book of Marquis de l'Hôpital had appeared, and almost all mathematicians began to turn to the new geometry of the infinite [that is, the new infinitesimal calculus], until then little known. The surprising universality of the methods, the elegant brevity of the proofs, the neatness and speed of the most difficult solutions, a singular and unexpected novelty, all attracted the mind and there was in the mathematical world a well marked revolution [une révolution bien marquée.