As a result of Cantor’s developments, one could divide the mathematical community into three sorts. There were the finitists, typified by the attitudes of Aristotle or Gauss, who would only speak of potential infinities, not of actual infinities. Then there were the intuitionists like Kronecker and Brouwer who denied that there was any meaningful content to the notion of quantities that are anything but finite. Infinities are just potentialities that can never be actually realised. To manipulate them and include them within the realm of mathematics would be like letting wolves into the sheepfold. Then there were the transfinitists like Cantor himself, who ascribe the same degree of reality to actual completed infinities as they did to finite quantities. In between, there existed a breed of manipulative transfinitists, typified by Hilbert, who felt no compunction or need to ascribe any ontological status to infinities but admitted them as useful ingredients of mathematical formalism whose presence was useful in simplifying and unifying other mathematical theories. “No one,” he predicted, “though he speak with the tongue of angels, will keep people from using the principle of the excluded middle.”