Pure mathematics, on the other hand, seems to me a rock on which all idealism founders: 317 is a prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped in one way rather than another, but _because it is so_ , because mathematical reality is built that way.. Mathematics is not a contemplative but a creative subject; no one can draw much consolation from it when he has lost the power or the desire to create; and that is apt to happen to a mathematician rather soon.I shall stick to that, but obviously it will need a good deal of expansion and explanation. In 1900 he took Part II of the Tripos, a more respect-worthy examination, and got his right place and his Fellowship. His greatest ideas of all, fluxions and the law of gravitation, came to him about 1666, when he was twenty-four—'in those days I was in the prime of my age for invention, and minded mathematics and philosophy more than at any time since'. D..
I do not remember what he was wearing. As for himself, he wished that he could live the creative life again, no better than it had been before: his own life was over
