"Quite aside from the fact that mathematics is the necessary instrument of natural science, purely mathematical inquiry in itself... by its special character, its certainty and stringency, lifts the human mind into closer proximity with the divine than is attainable through any other medium. Mathematics is the science of the infinite, its goal the symbolic comprehension of the infinite with human, that is finite, means. ...The connection between mathematics of the infinite and the perception of God was pursued most fervently by Nicholas of Cusa, the thinker who... intoned the new melody of thought which with Leonardo, Bruno, Kepler, and Descartes gradually swells into a triumphant symphony. He recognizes that the scholastic form of thinking, Aristotelian logic, which is based on... the excluded third, cannot... think the absolute, the infinite... every kind of "rational" theology is rejected, and "mystic" theology takes its place. ...The true love of God is amor de intellectualis [intellectual love]. ...Cusanus does not refer to the mystic form of contemplation, but rather to mathematics and its symbolic method. ...This urge finds its simplest expression in the sequence of numbers, which can be driven beyond any place by repeated addition of one."