 The emergence of a distinctive tradition of scientific thought addressed the question of unity through the designation of a privileged method, which involved a privileged language and set of concepts. Formally, at least, it was modeled after the Euclidean ideal of a system of geometry. In the late 16th century, Francis Bacon held that one unity of the sciences was the result of our organization of records of discovered material facts in the form of a pyramid with different levels of generalities. These could be classified in turn according to disciplines linked to human faculties. Concomitantly, the controlled interaction with phenomena of study characterized so-called experimental philosophy. In accordance with at least three traditions—the Pythagorean tradition, the Bible’s dictum in the Book of Wisdom and the Italian commercial tradition of bookkeeping—, Galileo proclaimed at the turn of the 17th century that the Book of Nature had been written by God in the language of mathematical symbols and geometrical truths; and that in it, the story of Nature’s laws was told in terms of a reduced set of objective, quantitative primary qualities: extension, quantity of matter and motion. A persisting rhetorical role for some form of theological unity of creation should not be neglected when considering pre-20th-century attempts to account for the possibility and desirability of some form of scientific knowledge. Throughout the 17th century, mechanical philosophy and Descartes’ and Newton’s systematization from basic concepts and first laws of mechanics became the most promising framework for the unification of natural philosophy. After the demise of Laplacian molecular physics in the first half of the 19th century, this role was taken over by ether mechanics and, unifying forces and matter, energy physics.