sentences:  The method of the "Discourse" and the "Encyclopedia" marked a shift from Descartes’ rationalism toward the empiricism of John Locke and Isaac Newton.In the "Discourse", d’Alembert rejects a priori, indemonstrable speculations that lead to error and “intellectual despotism” and assumes a method based on hard facts and evidence (xxxv).A main objective of the “Encyclopedia” was not only to organize a collection of known information, but also to establish a cohesive method of gathering facts and principles yet to be discovered.