Although these examples of Isidore’s thinking afford excellent proof of his incoherence and lack of logical consecutiveness, their explanation goes deeper. Like all primitive thinkers, those of medieval times were firmly convinced of the solidarity of the universe; they felt its unity much more strongly than they did its multiplicity; what we regard as separate kinds of phenomena and separate ways of viewing the universe they regarded as of necessity closely inter-related. There were no categories of thought that were for them mutually exclusive; they carried their ideas without hesitation from the material into the immaterial, and from the natural into the supernatural. No conception established in one sphere seemed impertinent in any other. It was this state of mind that enabled the medieval thinker to take such erratic leaps from one sphere of thought to another, without any feeling of uncertainty or any fear of getting lost.[93] [93] While this mode of viewing the universe had its origin in pagan antiquity, and even earlier, its scope was greatly enlarged by Christian thinkers. Living in a world whose general constitution and purpose they thought they thoroughly understood, they were confident that even in its smallest details there could be perceived a conscious adaptation to the whole. This idea they often carried so far as seemingly to leave no place for chance or convention. Each trifling matter was given a meaning that was greater than itself. Perhaps nothing illustrates more clearly the erratic thinking to which this idea of the solidarity of the universe led, than the way in which Isidore reasons about number. To his mind the fact, for instance, that “God in the beginning made twenty-two works” explains why there are twenty-two sextarii in the bushel; and that “there were twenty-two generations from Adam to Jacob, and twenty-two books of the Old Testament as far as Esther, and twenty-two letters of the alphabet out of which the divine law is composed”,[94] were additional explanations for the same thing. A like connection is found in his statement that “the pound is counted a kind of perfect weight because it is made up of as many ounces as the year has months”.[95] [94] _Etym._, 16, 26, 10. [95] _Etym._, 16, 25, 20.