Ravaisson declared himself a champion of freedom. He accepted the principle of Leibnitz, to the effect that everything has a reason, from which it follows that everything is necessitated, without which there could be no certitude and no science. But, says Ravaisson, there are two kinds of necessity—one absolute, one relative. The former is logical, the type of the principle of identity, and is found in syllogisms and in mathematics, which is just logic applied to quantity. The other type of necessity is moral, and is, unlike the former, perfectly in accord with freedom. It indeed implies freedom, the freedom of self-determination. The truly wise man can- not help doing what is right and good. The slave of Passion and caprice and evil has no freedom. The wise man selecting the good chooses it infallibly, but at the time with perfect free-will. “It is perhaps because the good or the beautiful is simply nothing other than love—that is, the power of will in all its purity, and so to will what is truly good is to will oneself (_c’est se vouloir soi-même_).”[12] [12] _La Philosophie en France_, p. 268. Nature is not, as the materialists endeavour to maintain, entirely geometrical—that is to say, fatalistic in character. Morality enters into the scheme of things and, with it, ends freely striven for. There is present a freedom which is a kind of necessity, yet opposed to fatalism. This freedom involves a determination by conceptions of perfection, ideals of beauty and of good. “Fatality is but an appearance; spontaneity and freedom constitute reality.”[13] So far, continues Ravaisson, from all things operating by brute mechanism or by pure hazard, things operate by the development of a tendency to perfection, to goodness and beauty. Instead of everything submitting to a blind destiny, everything obeys, and obeys willingly, a divine Providence. [13] _Ibid_., p. 270. Ravaisson’s fundamental spiritualism is clear in all this, and it serves as the starting-point for the thinkers who follow him. Spiritualism is bound up with spontaneity, creation, freedom, and this is his central point, this insistence on freedom. While resisting mechanical determination he endeavours to retain a determination of another kind—namely, by ends, a teleology or finalism. This is extremely interesting when observed in relation to the subsequent development in Lachelier, Boutroux, Blondel and Bergson.