 That perspective is formulated first in a talk Bernays presented in the fall of 1921, published as “Über Hilberts Gedanken zur Grundlegung der Mathematik” (1922). Starting with a discussion of structural axiomatics and pointing out its assumption of a system of objects that satisfies the axioms, he asserts this assumption contains “something so-to-speak transcendent for mathematics”. He raises the question, “which principled position should be taken with respect to it?” Bernays believes that it might be perfectly coherent to appeal to an intuitive grasp of the natural number sequence or even of the manifold of real numbers. However, that could not be an intuition in any primitive sense and would conflict with the tendency of the exact sciences to use only restricted means to acquire knowledge.