"Grosseteste aimed consciously at producing a synthesis of the cosmogony of Genesis and the cosmology of [ Aristotle's ] De Caelo. ...His intution led him to the conviction that mathematics, far from being an abstraction from aspects of the physically real, is the very internal texture of the natural world, presiding over its coming to be and controlling its functioning, that, in the words of Kepler, 'Ubi materia, ibi geometria' [Where there is matter, there is geometry]. Of course, this faith was metaphysical; but then so to was much of the high-level inspiration of scientists in the seventeenth century. It was abstract, because the mathematical structure of reality is not given to the senses, but intuited in or believed by the mind. What it afforded was not so much scientific results as delight in the pure understanding of the essence of things, and, what Grosseteste valued most of all, a glimpse beyond the beauty of the harmonious textura of things to the mind of the primus numerator [premier calculator], the lux prima et inaccessibilus [first and inaccessible light]. The novel aspect of Grosseteste's world-system goes back entirely to this conception of God as the great calculator. For the first time, it would appear, in the history of Christian belief, God is addressed as a mathematician whose ideas for creation are mathematical operations realizable in matter and form."