allowed to die, even this curious plea for a historical scholarship afflicted with amnesia made a certain kind of sense.

Since the remembrance of past times had evidently done more to keep people apart than to bring them together, it is not surprising that cosmopolitan philosophers had little use for either of the disciplines formerly held in such high esteem, law and theology—notoriously disputatious professions given to inconclusive wrangling about precedents, about the interpretation of historical documents, and about the meaning of the past. The Enlightenment hoped to model ethical and political theory not on historical understanding but on the method of science, which promised to lay down axiomatic principles resistant to doubt and thus to enable philosophers infallibly to distinguish right from wrong and truth from mere opinion. Beginning with Descartes, philosophers took up a new task: to analyze and make explicit the procedures that governed clear thinking. Once critical analysis had reduced phenomena to their simplest components, they believed, it could reassemble those components in the form of laws having universal validity.

It was a characteristic and revealing fantasy associated with this new conception of knowledge that language could be remodeled on mathematics—a project, according to Descartes, that would lay the basis for a universal language. The historical associations lodged in language, which lawyers, theologians, grammarians, and rhetoricians had attempted to unravel and decipher, appeared to the new philosophers as a source of contamination. Ordinary language, in their view, embodied cultural prejudices from which reason should struggle to free itself. "Almost all our words," Descartes complained, "have confused meanings, and men's minds are so accustomed to them that there is hardly anything which they can perfectly understand." Knowledge consisted of incontrovertible propositions, according to Descartes, which could be arrived at only by discounting the emotions and interests embedded in ordinary language.

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