Rabelais and some Elizabethans like Nashe. Then it divides 
steadily from language until Hopkins and the symbolists began 
to work at it in the nineteenth century. The point in all this will 
appear more plainly when we turn to the sixteenth century 
obsession with quantification. For number and measure are the 
mode of the tactile, and they are soon to be found departing 
from the visual humanist camp of letters. A great divorce 
between number, the language of science, and letters, the 
language of civilization, occurred in the later Renaissance. But 
the earlier phase of this divorce, as we shall see, was the 
Ramist method for “use” and applied knowledge by means of 
printed literature. For it cannot be sufficiently explained that 
the mechanization of the ancient handicraft of the scribe was 
itself “applied” knowledge. And the application consisted in the 
visual arresting and splitting up of the scribal action. That is 
why, once this solution to the problem of mechanization was