ABSTRACT
This chapter reintroduces a conception which, having served for two millennia as a guide to the understanding of nature, has been repudiated by the modern interpretation of science. The positivist view of science would indeed claim that the major discoveries of modern physics were based on a sceptical attitude towards the framework of hitherto accepted scientific theories. A reality underlying mathematical relations between observed facts was a metaphysical conception, without tangible content. Only philosophy was competent to arrive at an understanding of essential reality in nature. Centuries later the positivists declared once more that science can say nothing about ultimate reality, but theirs was a very different reason, namely that they thought any such claim to be meaningless. The mathematical image of reality is more abstract than the mechanical but its capacity to point beyond its immediate predicative content is similar to that of the mechanical image.
