In Lucretius' De rerum natura,

all objects in the world consisted of indivisible corpuscles, variously arranged, just as all words consisted of various combinations of a limited number of speech sounds or "letters". The inventor of the alphabet had thus established a principle that was fundamental to the physical sciences as well as to the study of language. Things of apparently endless complexity could in fact be reduced to a relatively small number of basic components, combined and recombined in innumberable ways. The "alphabetum naturae" became one of the standard images of the new science, used by Bacon, Boyle and others to describe their materialist vision of the world. The same image was extended by Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley and Hartley to describe human thought, which, they argued, consisted similarly of basic units or "simple ideas". a great aim of philosophy, proclaimed the young Leibniz, was to determine the "alphabetum cogitationum humanarum" -- the alphabet of human thought. (Hudson 38)