During the Classical age, the constant, fundamental relation of knowledge, even empirical knowledge, to a universal mathesis justified the project constantly resumed in various forms of a finally unified corpus of learning; this project assumed in turn, though without its foundation undergoing any modification, the aspect of a general science of movement, that of a universal characteristic, that of a language reﬂected upon and reconstituted in all its analytic values and all its syntactical possibilities, and, finally, that of an alphabetical or analytical Encyclopaedia of knowledge; it is of little importance that these endeavours did not reach fulfilment or that they did not entirely accomplish the purpose that had brought them into being: they all expressed, on the visible surface of events or texts, the profound unity that the Classical age had established by positing the analysis of identities and differences, and the universal possibility of tabulated order, as the archaeological basis of knowledge.