Leonardo died in despondency because he would not let go of the hope of a rational unity between the particulars and the universal.2 To have escaped this despondency Leonardo would have had to have been a different man. He would have had to let go his hope of a unity above and below the line. Leonardo, not being a modern man, never gave up the hope of a unified field of knowledge. He would not, in other words, give up the hope of educated man, who, in the past, has been marked by this insistence on a unified field of knowledge.
