It may well be objected that this dissociation of a body of knowledge conceived in its entirety as mathesis was not in fact a recession on the part of mathematics, for the very good reason that the knowledge in question had never led (except in the case of astronomy and certain areas of physics) to an effective mathematicization; rather, by disappearing, it left nature and the entire field of empiricities free for an application, limited and controlled moment by moment, of mathematics; for do not the first great advances of mathematical physics, the first massive utilizations of the calculation of probabilities, date from the time when the attempt at an immediate constitution of a general science of nonquantifiable orders was abandoned?