  In Weyl’s eyes, Hilbert’s approach embodied the “symbolic  representation of the transcendent, which demands to be  satisfied”, and so he regarded its emergence as a natural  development. But by 1927 Weyl saw Hilbert’s doctrine as beginning to  prevail over intuitionism, and in this an adumbration of “a decisive defeat of the philosophical attitude of pure  phenomenology, which thus proves to be insufficient for the  understanding of creative science even in the area of cognition that  is most primal and most readily open to   evidence—mathematics.”[31]  Since by this time Weyl had become convinced that “creative  science” must necessarily transcend what is  phenomenologically given, he had presumably already accepted that  pure phenomenology is incapable of accounting for theoretical  physics, let alone the whole of existence. But it must have been  painful for him to concede the analogous claim in the case of  mathematics. In 1932, he asserts: “If mathematics is  taken by itself, one should restrict oneself with Brouwer to the  intuitively cognizable truths … nothing compels us to go  farther.” If mathematics could be “taken by  itself”, then there would be no need for it to justify its  practices by resorting to “symbolic construction”, to  employ symbols which in themselves “signify  nothing”—nothing, at least, accessible to intuition. But, unlike Brouwer, Weyl seems finally to have come to terms with the  idea that mathematics could not simply be “taken by  itself”, that it has a larger role to play in the world beyond  its service as a paradigm, however pure, of subjective certainty.