so John U. Nef has given us the connection between 
Renaissance science and commerce. His Cultural Foundations of  
Industrial Civilization  is a study of quantification, especially as 
it intruded into the commercial world. The spirit of rigorous 
separation and translation of functions by stress on visual 
quantity had beset the later scholastic centuries and 
contributed to the mechanization of the scribal craft, as we 
have seen. The pursuit of dichotomies and divisions carried over 
from scholasticism to mathematics and science, as Nef 
indicates (pp. 4­5):

          The very separation of science from faith, from 
     ethics and from art, which is so characteristic of our 
     times, is at the roots of the industrialized world in which 
     we live. In a letter destined for Fermat, which he sent to 
     Father Mersenne in 1637, Descartes remarked that the