 Descartes and Leibniz gave this tradition a rationalist twist that was centered on the powers of human reason and the ideal of system of knowledge, on a foundation of rational principles. It became the project of a universal framework of exact categories and ideas, a mathesis universalis (Garber 1992 and Gaukroger 2002). Adapting the scholastic image of knowledge, Descartes proposed an image of a tree in which metaphysics is depicted by the roots, physics by the trunk, and the branches depict mechanics, medicine and morals. Leibniz proposed a general science in the form of a demonstrative encyclopedia. This would be based on a “catalogue of simple thoughts” and an algebraic language of symbols, characteristica universalis, which would render all knowledge demonstrative and allow disputes to be resolved by precise calculation. Both defended the program of founding much of physics on metaphysics and ideas from life science (Smith 2011) (Leibniz’s unifying ambitions with symbolic language and physics extended beyond science, to settle religious and political fractures in Europe). By contrast, while sharing a model of geometric axiomatic structure of knowledge, Newton’s project of natural philosophy was meant to be autonomous from a system of philosophy and, in the new context, still endorsed for its model of organization and its empirical reasoning values of formal synthesis and ontological simplicity (see the entry on  Newton  and Janiak 2008).