One asks one’s self how it was that the old way of writing, as a personal art, gave place to the new way of writing, as a mere impersonal pseudo-science, rigidly bound by formal and artificial rules. The answer, no doubt, is to be found in the existence of a great new current of thought which began mightily to stir in men’s minds towards the end of the seventeenth century. It will be remembered that it was at that time, both in England and France, that the new devitalised, though more flexible, prose appeared, with its precision and accuracy, its conscious orderliness, its deliberate method. But only a few years before, over France and England alike, a great intellectual wave had swept, imparting to the mathematical and geometrical sciences, to astronomy, physics, and allied studies, an impetus that they had never received before on so great a scale. Descartes in France and Newton in England stand out as the typical representatives of the movement. If that movement had to exert any influence on language—and we know how sensitively language reacts to thought—it could have been manifested in no other way than by the change which actually took place. And there was every opportunity for that influence to be exerted.[68] This sudden expansion of the mathematical and geometrical sciences was so great and novel that interest in it was not confined to a small band of men of science: it excited the man in the street, the woman in the drawing-room; it was indeed a woman, a bright and gay woman of the world, who translated Newton’s profound book into French. Thus it was that the new qualities of style were invented, not merely to express new qualities of thought, but because new scientific ideals were moving within the minds of men. A similar reaction of thought on language took place at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when an attempt was made to vitalise language once more, and to break the rigid and formal moulds the previous century had constructed. The attempt was immediately preceded by the awakening of a new group of sciences, but this time the sciences of life, the biological studies associated with Cuvier and Lamarck, with John Hunter and Erasmus Darwin. With the twentieth century we see the temporary exhaustion of the biological spirit with its historical form in science and its romantic form in art, and we have a neo-classic spirit which has involved a renaissance of the mathematical sciences and, even before that, was beginning to affect speech.