 Brentano took a somewhat dim view of the efforts of mathematicians to construct the continuum from numbers. His attitude varied from rejecting such attempts as inadequate to according them the status of  “fictions”.[37]  This is not surprising given his Aristotelian inclination to take mathematical and physical theories to be genuine descriptions of empirical phenomena rather than idealizations: in his view, if such theories were to be taken as literal descriptions of experience, they would amount to nothing better than “misrepresentations”.