Meditations - pg. xxvii

The application of identical methods implies or means identical acts of the mind; which in turn reveals to us that it is not the objects -- numbers, lines -- that matter, but objects together, compare them to each other, measure them by each other, and thus establish between them a serial order; an order of dynamic production (and not of classification, like the static order of genera and species in scholastic logic) in which each successive term depends on the preceding one and determines that which follows. Now is this is true, if it is the operational order that matters, the order which the algebraical formula discloses and presents to us in its intellectual unity, and not the objects that embody and exemplify it, then it is obvious that by means of these formulae every spatial relation can be transposed into a numerical one, and vice verse; or at a deeper level, that every algebraic formula can be translated into the language of numbers and of lines. And it is obvious, too, that it is this science of order which supplies the foundation of rational knowledge, and this because it is reason in being, because in it our mind studies only its own acts, its own operations, its own diaphanous relations to itself.