"Now Faulhaber was a real Rosicrucian and a very ardent one, and one is justified in assuming, in spite of Baillet's denials, that Descartes found in him the man he was seeking, and that through him Descartes entered into direct contact with the intellectual atmosphere of the Rosecrucians. Might not such contact, however fleeting, have a declining influence upon the moral lines and aims of the philosopher's life? May we not even ask ourselves whether at its origin. Descartes' great idea did not permit the supposition that he intended—an intention that became hazier as time went on—fearlessly to transpose to the plane of everyday reason and of the most widespread common sense the design followed on the plane of alchemic mysteries by the naive Rosicrucians, and in doing so render it much less "uplifted," but much more efficacious—mathematics replacing the Cabala leading to universal knowledge, the hermetic sciences and their occult qualities giving place henceforth to geometric physics and the art of mechanics, as the elixir of life to the laws of rational medicine?"