ABSTRACT
A metaphysic of scientific method is concerned with the nature of a world in which the result of scientific investigation is always subject to contingency and error, but also to the possibility of self-correction according to an invariable ideal. The main metaphysical contention of anti-rationalism with its banal shibboleth about life, the organic and the dynamic is that things have no constant nature, that everything is pure change and nothing else. As materialism has served as a sort of “bogey-man” to scare immature metaphysicians, it is well to make more explicit its relation to rational scientific method. Scientific method, it is generally recognized, depends on the principle of causality. Contrary to the usual views of it, the principle of sufficient reason as actually relied on in scientific procedure is not only compatible with a domain of chance, contingency, or indetermination, but positively demands it as the correlative of the universality of law.
