“We can not… escape the conclusion that the rule of reasoning by recurrence is irreducible to the principle of contradiction. …Neither can this rule come to us from experience… This rule, inaccessible to analytic demonstration and to experience, is the veritable type of the synthetic a priori judgment. On the other hand, we can not think of seeing in it a convention, as in some of the postulates of geometry. …it is only the affirmation of the power of the mind which knows itself capable of conceiving the indefinite repetition of the same act when once this act is possible. The mind has a direct intuition of this power, and experience can only give occasion for using it and thereby becoming conscious of it.”

—  Henri Poincaré , book Science and Hypothesis

Source: Science and Hypothesis (1901), Ch. I. (1905) Tr. George Bruce Halstead

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Henri Poincaré 49
French mathematician, physicist, engineer, and philosopher … 1854–1912

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