IX
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Poincaré, Henri and Halsted, George Bruce
The end of Hilbert's memoir is altogether enigmatic and I shall not lay stress upon it. Contradictions accumulate; we feel that the author is dimly conscious of the petitio principii he has committed, and that he seeks vainly to patch up the holes in his argument.
What does this mean? At the point of proving that the definition of the whole number by the assumption of complete induction implies no contradiction, Hilbert withdraws as Russell and Couturat withdrew, because the difficulty is too great.