ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that F. Ravaisson spiritualism, inspired by G. W. Leibniz, had asserted two types of cause, efficient and final, thus trying to satisfy the demands both of science and of metaphysics. It argues that the movement has perpetuated the initial error of a dualistic spiritualism; and that, instead of being genuinely resolved in a metaphysic of knowing, the problem of science has only been revived in an accentuated form in a new metaphysic of being. From among the tissue of relations between empirical facts, science selects such as prove most useful for the purpose of its research; and the selection is a convention, an arbitrary practical act of the scientist. The dogmatic presupposition, however, that outside the process of science there exist complete and ready-made things, causes the creation of certainty to be understood as something arbitrary, and the ideal character of thought as equivalent to useful falsification of reality.
