 This way of treating philosophy as an aggregate of rigidly separated arts may have had some pedagogical value, but it also raised difficulties. Ramus, for instance, could not accept metaphysics as a separate discipline, although in this case his nominalism was also in operation. By insisting that every art must have its correctly formulated theorems, organized from the more general to the more specific, and that no theorem should be allowed to have reference to more than one art, Ramus almost seems to impose a military discipline on nature. Sometimes his followers defined philosophy as merely a methodical collection of arts, a collectio methodica, which reveals even more clearly their understanding of the discipline.