My conception sounds ill-natured only if it is wrong — but we do not know that it is wrong. The friend whom I mentioned caricatured it; he said that according to Hogarth humanity is a hunchback who, in ignorance of the fact that it is possible not to be hunchbacked, for thousands of years has sought an indication of a Higher Necessity in his hump, because he will accept any theory but the one that says that his deformity is purely accidental, that no one bestowed it upon him as part of a master plan, that it serves absolutely no purpose, for the thing was determined by the twists and turns of anthropogenesis.

But I intended to speak about myself, not about the species. I do not know where it came from or what caused it, but even now, after all these years, I find within myself that malice, as vigorous as ever, because the energies of our most primitive impulses never age. Do I shock? Over many decades now, I have acted like a rectification column, producing a distillate composed of the pile of my articles as well as of the articles occasioned by them — hagiography. If you say that you are not interested in the inner workings of the apparatus which I unnecessarily bring out into the light, note that I, in the purity of the nourishment I have vouchsafed you, see the indelible signs of all my secrets.

Mathematics for me was no Arcadia; it was, rather, a court of last resort, a church that I entered, unbelieving, because it offered sanctuary. My principal metamathematical work has been called destructive, and not without reason. It was no accident that I called into question, irreversibly, the foundations of mathematical deduction and the concept of the analytic in logic. I turned the tools of statistics against these basic notions — until at last they crumbled. I could not be a devil underground and an angel in the light of day. I created, yes, but on ruins, and Yowitt is right: I took away more truths than I ever gave.