It seems clear from his notebooks that Leonardo was attempting to outline an underlying science for all things. He sought its rules by finding the shared principles behind the varied phenomena of nature he investigated. However, he could not stop at the principles. He had a need to go beyond this to find all the variations he observed based on a multitude of effects. All details and variations in nature needed to be fully described, and understood. Only when every possible cause and effect had been studied could one come to a true understanding of how nature worked.
