Johann Daniel Major (1634–1693) made taxis, a revocable ordering of units, the main subject of his lifelong research across all domains. He derived this concept from experiments in color changes in liquid solutions, an area of research that was especially vibrant in his cultural and intellectual milieu. Major drew on Cartesianism to query qualitative views of color and color change but he disagreed with rational Cartesians that reason could suffice to counteract the impact of original sin on knowledge. Due to the strife and sickness debilitating matter and human thought (itself highly conditioned by matter), Major remained skeptical that it was possible to identify the most basic building blocks of matter and thus focused more on synthesis and the complex textures it produced than upon analysis. Understanding had to remain provisional as experimental knowledge developed. Taxis provided Major the framework through which a dynamic array of knowledge could be co-articulated with a dynamic array of nature.