“From all this we concluded that the first two divisions of theoretical philosophy should
rather be called guesswork than knowledge, theology because of its completely invisible
and ungraspable nature, physics because of the unstable and unclear nature of the matter;
hence there is no hope that philosophers will ever be agreed about them; and that only
mathematics can provide sure and unshakable knowledge to its devotees, provided one
approaches it rigorously. For its kind of proof proceeds by indisputable methods, namely
arithmetic and geometry (tr. Toomer, p. 6).”