Even as Cartesianism[i-133] in France is said to have fostered logic and lucidity of detail, and that which is universally valid and recognized by all men, and that art which is aloof to the non-human world, so in England may Newtonianism (which overthrew Cartesianism) have conditioned writers to develop a uniform style, purged of tenuous rhetorical devices. An age characterized by a worship of reason, which was supposed to be identical in all men, an age deferring to the general mind of man, would be hostile to the rhetorical caprices of those expressing their private, idiosyncratic enthusiasms. If the neoclassic apotheosis of simplicity and freedom from intricacy was the result of a "rationalistic anti-intellectualism,"[i-134] expressed in terms of hostility to belabored proof of ideas known to the general will, then it would seem that one of the factors sturdily conditioning this hostility was Newtonian science. Admitting that _reason_ leads to uniformitarianism, one may recall that the processes of science are discoverable by reason, and that such a cosmologist as Newton illustrated mathematically and empirically a system, grand in its lucidity, and capable of being apprehended by all through reason. If the deistic fear of "enthusiasm" in religion--the individual will prevailing against the _consensus gentium_--parallels, according to Professor Lovejoy, the neoclassic fear of feeling and the unrestrained play of imagination in art, then Newtonian science, as it reinforced deism, was no negligible factor in discrediting enthusiasm, and hence indirectly militating against originality, emotion, and the unchecked imagination. Is it not conceivable that the Newtonian[i-135] cosmology, popularized by a vast discipleship, challenged the scientists and men of letters alike to achieve a corresponding order, clarity, and simplicity in poetry and prose?