"Descartes' importance for science does not lie in the details of his cosmology. His decipherment of Nature might be crude, yet he had the courage to insist that mechanical sense could be made of the workings of Nature, throughout the realms of physics, chemistry, and even physiology. By reasserting the unity and rationality of Nature, he did as much as any man to put seventeenth-century scientists back on the intellectual road first trodden by the Greeks."