Since matter is in itself nothing, a bare unrealised capacity, while form is actuality, the completed and perfected being, it follows that form is something higher than matter. But matter is what becomes form. In order of time, therefore, matter is earlier, form later. But in order of thought, and in reality, it is otherwise. For when we say that matter is the potentiality of what it is to become, this implies that what it is to become is already present in it ideally and potentially, though not actually. The end, therefore, is already present in the beginning. The oak is in the acorn, ideally, otherwise the oak could never come out of it. And since all becoming is towards the end, and would not take place but for the end, the end is the operative principle and true cause of becoming. Motion is produced not by a mechanical propulsive force, pushing from behind, so to speak, but by an ideal attractive force, drawing the thing towards its end, as a piece of iron is drawn to the magnet. It is the end itself which exerts this force. And, therefore, the end must be present at the beginning, for if it were not present it could exert no force. Nay, more. It is not only present in the beginning, it is anterior to it. For the end is the cause of the motion, and the cause is logically prior to its consequence. The end, or the principle of form, is thus the absolute first in thought and reality, though it may be the last in time. If, then,{281}we ask what, for Aristotle, is that ultimate reality, that first principle, from which the entire universe flows, the answer is, the end, the principle of form. And as form is the universal, the Idea, we see that his fundamental thesis is the same as Plato's. It is the one thesis of all idealism, namely, that thought, the universal, reason, is the absolute being, the foundation of the world. Where he differs from Plato is in denying that form has any existence apart from the matter in which it exhibits itself.
Now all this may strike the unsophisticated as very strange. That the absolute being whence the universe flows should be described as that which lies at the end of the development of the universe, and that philosophy should proceed to justify this by asserting that the end is really prior to the beginning, this is so far removed from the common man's mode of thought, that it may appear mere paradox. It is, however, neither strange nor paradoxical. It is essentially sound and true, and it seems strange to the ordinary man only because it penetrates so much deeper into things than he can. This thought is, in fact, essential to a developed idealism, and till it is grasped no advance can be made in philosophy. Whether it is understood is, indeed, a good test of whether a man has any talent for philosophy or not. The fact is that all philosophies of this sort regard time as unreal, as an appearance. This being so, the relation of the absolute being, or God, to the world cannot be a relation of time at all. The common man's idea is that, if there is a first principle or God at all, He must have existed before the world began, and then, somehow, perhaps billions of years ago, something happened as a{282}result of which the world came into being. The Absolute is thus conceived as the cause, the world as the effect, and the cause always precedes its effect in time. Or if, on the other hand, we think that the world never had a beginning, the ordinary man's thought would lead him to believe that, in that case, it is no longer necessary to assume a first principle at all. But if time is a mere appearance, this whole way of looking at things must be wrong. God is not related to the world as cause to effect. It is not a relation of time at all. It is alogicalrelation. God is rather the logical premise, of which the world is the conclusion, so that, God granted, the world follows necessarily, just as, the premises granted, the conclusion follows. This is the reason why, in discussing Plato, we said that it must be possible todeducethe world from his first principle. If the Absolute were merely the cause of the world in time, it would not explain the world, for, as I have so often pointed out, causes explain nothing. But if the world be deducible from the Absolute, the world is explained, a reason, not a cause, is given for it, just as the premises constitute the reason for the conclusion. Now the conclusion of a syllogism follows from the premises, that is, the premises come first, the conclusion second. But the premise only comes first in thought, not in time. It is a logical succession, not a time-succession. Just in the same way, the Absolute, or in Aristotle's language, the form, is logically first, but is not first in order of time. And though it is the end, it is in thought the absolute beginning, and is thus the foundation of the world, the first principle from which the world flows. The objection may be, taken that if the relation of the{283}Absolute to the world is not a time-relation, then it can no more be the end than the beginning. This objection is, as we shall see, a misunderstanding of Aristotle's philosophy. Although things in time strive towards the end, yet the absolute end is not in time at all, or, in other words, the end is never reached. Its relation to the world as end is just as much a logical, and not a time-relation, as its relation to the world as beginning or absolute prius. As far as time is concerned, the universe is without beginning or end.
As the world-process is a continual elevation of matter into higher and higher forms, there results the conception that the universe exhibits a continuous scale of being. That is higher in the scale in which form predominates, that lower in which matter outweighs form. At the bottom of the scale will be absolutely formless matter, at the top, absolutely matterless form. Both these extremes, however, are abstractions. Neither of them exists, because matter and form cannot be separated. Whatever exists comes somewhere between the two, and the universe thus exhibits a process of continuous gradations. Motion and change are produced by the effort to pass from the lower to the higher under the attractive force of the end.
That which comes at the top of the scale, absolute form, is called by Aristotle, God. And the definitions of God's character follow from this as a matter of course. First, since form is actuality, God alone is absolutely actual. He alone is real. All existent things are more or less unreal. The higher in the scale are the more real, as possessing more form. The scale of being is thus also a scale of reality, shading off through infinite gradations{284}from the absolutely real, God, to the absolutely unreal, formless matter. Secondly, since the principle of form contains the formal, the final, and the efficient causes, God is all these. As formal cause, He is the Idea. He is essentially thought, reason. As final cause, He is the absolute end. He is that to which all beings strive. Each being has no doubt its own end in itself. But as absolute end, God includes all lower ends. And as the end of each thing is the completed perfection of the thing, so, as absolute end, God is absolute perfection. Lastly, as efficient cause, God is the ultimate cause of all motion and becoming. He is the first mover. As such, He is Himself unmoved. That the first mover should be itself unmoved is a necessary consequence of Aristotle's conception of it as end and form. For motion is the transition of a thing towards its end. The absolute end can have no end beyond it, and therefore cannot be moved. Likewise motion is the passage of matter into form. Absolute form cannot pass into any higher form, and is therefore unmoved. But the argument which Aristotle himself more frequently uses to establish the immovability of the first mover is that, unless we so conceive it, no cause of motion appears. The moving object is moved perhaps by another moving object. The motion of the latter demands a further cause. If this further cause is itself moving, we must again ask for the cause of its motion. If this process goes on for ever, then motion is unexplained, and no real cause of it has been shown. The real and ultimate cause must therefore be unmoved.
This last argument sounds as if Aristotle is now thinking in terms of mechanism. It sounds as if he meant that{285}the first mover is something at the beginning of time, which, so to speak, gave things a push to start them off. This is not what Aristotle means. For the true efficient cause is the final cause. And God is the first mover only in His character as absolute end. As far as time is concerned, neither the universe, nor the motion in it, ever had any beginning. Every mechanical cause has its cause in turn, and soad infinitum. God is not a first cause, in our sense, that is, a first mechanical cause which existed before the world, and created it. He is a teleological cause working from the end. But as such, He is logically prior to all beginning, and so is the first mover. And just as the universe has no beginning in time, so it has no end in time. It will go on for ever. Its end is absolute form, but this can never be reached, because if it were, this would mean that absolute form would exist, whereas we have seen that form cannot exist apart from matter.
God is thought. But the thought of what? As absolute form, he is not the form of matter, but the form of form. His matter, so to speak, is form. Form, as the universal, is thought. And this gives us Aristotle's famous definition of God as "the thought of thought." He thinks only his own self. He is at once the subject and the object of his thought. As mortal men think material things, as I now think the paper on which I write, so God thinks thought. In more modern terms, he is self-consciousness, the absolute subject-object. That God should think anything other than thought is inconceivable, because the end of all other thought is outside the thought itself. If I think this paper, the end of my thought, the paper, is outside me. But the thought of{286}God, as the absolute end, cannot have any end outside itself. Were God to think anything else than thought, he would be determined by that which is not himself. By way of further expression of the same idea, Aristotle passes into figurative language. God, he says, lives in eternal blessedness, and his blessedness consists in the everlasting contemplation of his own perfection.
A modern will naturally ask whether Aristotle's God is personal. It does not do to be very dogmatic upon the point. Aristotle, like Plato, never discusses the question. No Greek ever did. It is a modern question. What we have to do, then, is to take the evidence on both sides. The case for personality is that the language Aristotle uses implies it. The very word God, used instead of the Absolute, or form, conveys the idea of personality. And when he goes on to speak of God living in eternal blessedness, these words, if taken literally, can mean nothing except that God is a conscious person. If we say that this language is merely figurative, it may be replied that Aristotle on principle objects to figurative language, that he frequently censures Plato for using it, that what he demands and sets out to supply is exact, literal, scientific terminology, and that he is not likely to have broken his own canons of philosophic expression by using merely poetical phrases.
To see the other side of the case, we must first ask what personality means. Now without entering into an intricate discussion of this most elusive idea, we may answer that personality at any rate implies anindividualandexistentconsciousness. But, in the first place, God is absolute form, and form is the universal. What is universal, with no particular in it, cannot be an individual.{287}God, therefore, cannot be individual. Secondly, form without matter cannot exist. And as God is form without matter, he cannot be called existent, though he is absolutely real. God, therefore, is neither existent nor individual. And this means that he is not a person. To degrade the real to the level of the existent, to convert the universal into the individual, is exactly the fault for which Aristotle blames Plato. It is exactly the fault which it was the whole object of his philosophy to remedy. If he thought that God is a person, he committed the same fault himself in an aggravated form.
We have, then, two hypotheses, both of which involve that Aristotle was guilty of some inconsistency. If God is not a person, then Aristotle's language is figurative, and his use of such language is inconsistent with his rooted objection to its use. This, however, is, after all, merely an inconsistency of language, and not of thought. It does not mean that Aristotle really contradicted himself. It merely means that, though he set himself to express his philosophy in technical scientific terms, and to exclude figurative language, yet he found himself compelled in a few passages to make use of it. There are some metaphysical ideas so abstract, so abstruse, that it is almost impossible to express them at all without the use of figures of speech. Language was made by common men for common purposes, and this fact often forces the philosopher to use terms which he knows only figure forth his meaning without accurately expressing it. Perhaps every philosophy in the world finds itself sometimes under this necessity, and, if Aristotle did so, and was thereby technically inconsistent with himself, it is no wonder, and involves no serious blame upon him.
{288}
But the other hypothesis, that God is a person, means that Aristotle committed a contradiction, not merely in words, but in thought, and not merely as regards some unimportant detail, but as regards the central thesis of his system. It means that he stultified himself by making his conception of God absolutely contradict the essentials of his system. For what is the whole of Aristotle's philosophy, put in a nutshell? It is that the Absolute is the universal, but that the universal does not exist apart from the particular. Plato supplied the thought of the first clause of the sentence. Aristotle added the last clause, and it is the essential of his philosophy. To assert that God, the absolute form, exists as an individual, is flatly to contradict this. It is not likely that Aristotle should have contradicted himself in so vital a matter, and in a manner which simply means that his system falls to the ground like a house of cards.
My conclusion, then, is that it was not Aristotle's intention that what he calls God should be regarded as a person. God is thought, but not subjective thought. He is not thought existent in a mind, but objective thought, real on its own account, apart from any mind which thinks it, like Plato's Ideas. But Plato's mistake was to suppose that because thought is real and objective, it must exist. Aristotle avoids this error. The absolute thought is the absolutely real. But it does not exist. With the concept of God the metaphysics of Aristotle closes.
4. Physics, or the Philosophy of Nature.
The existent universe is a scale of being lying between the two extremes of formless matter and matterless form. But this must not be merely asserted, as a general{289}principle. It must be carried out in detail. The passage of matter into form must be shown in its various stages in the world of nature. To do this is the object of Aristotle's Physics, or philosophy of nature.
If nature is to be understood, we must keep in mind certain general points of view. In the first place, since form includes end, the entire world-process, as passage of matter into form, is essentially movement towards ends. Everything in nature has its end and function. Nothing is purposeless. Nature seeks everywhere to attain the best possible. Everywhere we find evidences of design and of rational plan. Aristotle's philosophy of nature is essentially teleological. This does not, however, exclude the principle of mechanism, and to investigate mechanical causes is part of the duty of science. But mechanical causes turn out in the end to be teleological, because the true efficient cause is the final cause.
But if nothing in nature is aimless or useless, this is not to be interpreted in a narrow anthropocentric spirit. It does not mean that everything exists for the use of man, that the sun was created to give him light by day, the moon by night, and that plants and animals exist only for his food. It is true that, in a certain sense, everything else sublunary isforman. For man is the highest in the scale of beings in this terrestrial sphere, and therefore as the higher end, he includes all lower ends. But this does not exclude the fact that lower beings have each its own end. They exist for themselves and not for us.
Another mistake which we must avoid is to suppose that the design in nature means that nature is conscious of her designs, or, on the other hand, that there is any{290}existent consciousness outside the world which governs and controls it. The latter supposition is excluded by the fact that God is not an existent conscious person, the former by its own inherent absurdity. The only being upon this earth who is conscious of his ends is man. Such animals as bees and ants appear to work rationally, and their activities are clearly governed by design. But it is not to be supposed that they are reasoning beings. They attain their ends instinctively. And when we come to inorganic matter, we find that even here its movements are purposive, but no one could suppose them deliberate and conscious. These manifold activities of lower nature are indeed the work of reason, but not of an existent or self-conscious reason. And this means that instinct, and even mechanical forces such as gravitation are, in their essence, reason. It is not that they are created by reason, but that they are reason, exhibiting itself in lower forms. In commenting upon Plato's dualism of sense and reason, I remarked that any true philosophy, though recognizing the distinction between sense and reason, must yet find room for their identity, and must show that sense is but a lower form of reason. This idea Aristotle thoroughly understood, and sought to show, not merely that sense is reason, but even that the activities of inorganic matter, such as gravitation, are so. In the result, nature, though working through reason, is not conscious of the fact, does so blindly and instinctively, and is compared to a creative artist, who forms beautiful objects by instinct, or, as we should say, by inspiration, without setting before his mind the end to be attained or the rules to be observed in order to attain it.
{291}
In the process of nature, it is always form which impels, matter which retards and obstructs. The entire world-movement is the effort of form to mould matter, but, just because matter has in itself a power of resistance, this effort does not always succeed. This is the reason why form cannot exist without matter, because it can never wholly overcome the clogging activity of matter, and therefore matter can never be wholly moulded into form. And this explains, too, the occasional occurrence in nature of freaks, monstrosities, abortions, and unnatural births. In these the form has failed to mould the matter. Nature has failed to attain her ends. Science, therefore, should study the normal and natural rather than the abnormal and monstrous. For it is in the normal that the ends of nature are to be seen, and through them alone nature can be understood. Aristotle is fond of using the words "natural" and "unnatural," but he uses them always with this special meaning. That is natural which attains its end, that in which the form successfully masters the matter.
No doctrine of physics can ignore the fundamental notions of motion, space, and time. Aristotle, therefore, finds it necessary to consider these. Motion is the passage of matter into form, and it is of four kinds. The first is motion which affects the substance of a thing, origination and decease. Secondly, change of quality. Thirdly, change of quantity, increase and decrease. Fourthly, locomotion, change of place. Of these, the last is the most fundamental and important.
Aristotle rejects the definition of space as the void. Empty space is an impossibility. Hence, too, he disagrees with the view of Plato and the Pythagoreans that{292}the elements are composed of geometrical figures. And connected with this is his repudiation of the mechanical hypothesis that all quality is founded upon quantity, or upon composition and decomposition. Quality has a real existence of its own. He rejects, also, the view that space is a physical thing. If this were true, there would be two bodies occupying the same place at the same time, namely the object and the space it fills. Hence there is nothing for it but to conceive space as limit. Space is, therefore, defined as the limit of the surrounding body towards what is surrounded. As we shall see later, in another connexion, Aristotle did not regard space as infinite.
Time is defined as the measure of motion in regard to what is earlier and later. It thus depends for its existence upon motion. If there were no change in the universe, there would be no time. And since it is the measuring or counting of motion, it also depends for its existence upon a counting mind. If there were no mind to count, there could be no time. This presents difficulties to us, if we conceive that there was a time when conscious beings did not exist. But this difficulty is non-existent for Aristotle, who believed that men and animals have existed from all eternity. The essentials of time, therefore, are two: change and consciousness. Time is the succession of thoughts. If we object that the definition is bad because succession already involves time, there is doubtless no answer possible.
As to the infinite divisibility of space and time, and the riddles proposed thereupon by Zeno, Aristotle is of opinion that space and time are potentially divisible{293}ad infinitum, but are not actually so divided. There is nothing to prevent us from going on for ever with the process of division, but space and time are not given in experience as infinitely divided.
After these preliminaries, we can pass on to consider the main subject of physics, the scale of being. We should notice, in the first place, that it is also a scale of values. What is higher in the scale of being is of more worth, because the principle of form is more advanced in it. It constitutes also a theory of development, a philosophy of evolution. The lower develops into the higher. It does not, however, so develop in time. That the lower form passes in due time into a higher form is a discovery of modern times. Such a conception was impossible for Aristotle. For him, genus and species are eternal. They have neither beginning nor end. Individual men are born and die, but the species man never dies, and has always existed upon the earth. The same is true of plants and animals. And since man has always existed, he cannot have evolved in time from a lower being. There is no room here for Darwinism. In what sense, then, is this a theory of development or evolution? The process involved is not a time-process, it is a logical process, and the development is a logical development. The lower always contains the higher potentially. The man is in the ape ideally. The higher, again, contains the lower actually. The man is all that the ape is, and more also. What is merely implicit in the lower form is explicit in the higher. The form which is dimly seen struggling to light in the lower, has realized itself in the higher. The higher is the same thing as the lower, but it is the same thing in a more{294}evolved state. The higher presupposes the lower and rests upon it as foundation. The higher is the form of which the lower is the matter. It actually is what the lower is struggling to become. Hence the entire universe is one continuous chain. It is a process; not a time-process, but an eternal process. The one ultimate reality, God, reason, absolute form, eternally exhibits itself in every stage of its development. All the stages, therefore, must exist for ever side by side.
Now the form of a thing is its organization. Hence to be higher in the scale means to be more organized. The first distinction, therefore, with which nature presents us is between the organic and the inorganic. Aristotle was the discoverer of the idea of organism, as he was also the inventor of the word. At the bottom of the scale of being, therefore, is inorganic matter. Inorganic matter is the nearest existent thing to absolutely formless matter, which, of course, does not exist. In the inorganic world matter preponderates to such an extent as almost to overwhelm form, and we can only expect to see the universal exhibiting itself in it in a vague and dim way. What, then, is its form? And this is the same as asking what its function, end, or essential activity is. The end of inorganic matter is merely external to it. Form has not truly entered into it at all, and remains outside it. Hence the activity of inorganic matter can only be to move in space towards its external end. This is the explanation of what we, in modern times, call gravitation. But, according to Aristotle, every element has its peculiar and natural motion; its end is conceived merely spatially, and its activity is to move towards its "proper place," and, having thus reached its end, it rests. The natural{295}movement of fire is up. We may call this a principle of levitation, as opposed to gravitation. Aristotle has been the subject of cheap criticism on account of his frequent use of the words "natural" and "unnatural." [Footnote 15] It is said that he was satisfied to explain the operations of nature by simply labelling them "natural." If you ask a quite uneducated person why heavy bodies fall, he may quite possibly reply, "Oh!naturallythey fall." This simply means that the man has never thought about the matter at all, and thinks whatever is absolutely familiar to him is "natural" and needs no explanation. It is like the feminine argument that a thing is so, "because it is." It is assumed that Aristotle was guilty of a like futility. This is not the case. His use of the word "natural" does not indicate lack of thought. There is a thought, an idea, here. No doubt he was quite wrong in many of his facts. Thus there is no such principle as levitation in the universe. But there is a principle of gravitation, and when he explains this by saying it is "natural" for earth to move downwards, he means, not that the fact is familiar, but that the principle of form, or the world-reason, can only exhibit itself here so dimly as to give rise to a comparatively aimless and purposeless movement in a straight line. Not absolutely purposeless, however, because nothing in the world is such, and the purpose here is simply the movement of matter towards its end. This may or may not be a true explanation of gravity. But has anybody since ever explained it better?
[Footnote 15: See,e.g.Sir Alexander Grant'sAristotlein the Ancient Classics for English Readers Series (Blackwood), pages 119-121.]
This gives us, too, the clue to the distinction between{296}the inorganic and the organic. If inorganic matter is what has its end outside itself, organic matter will be what has its end within itself. This is the essential character of an organism, that its end is internal to it. It is an inward self-developing principle. Its function, therefore, can only be the actualisation, the self-realization of this inward end. Whereas, therefore, inorganic matter has no activity except spatial movement, organic matter has for its activity growth, and this growth is not the mere mechanical addition of extraneous matter, as we add a pound of tea to a pound of tea. It is true growth from within. It is the making outward of what is inward. It is the making explicit of what is implicit. It is the making actual of what is potential in the embryo organism.
The lowest in the scale of being is thus inorganic matter, and above it comes organic matter, in which the principle of form becomes real and definite as the inward organization of the thing. This inward organization is the life, or what we call the soul, of the organism. Even the human soul is nothing but the organization of the body. It stands to the body in the relation of form to matter. With organism, then, we reach the idea of living soul. But this living soul will itself have lower and higher grades of being, the higher being a higher realization of the principle of form. As the essential of organism is self-realization, this will express itself first as self-preservation. Self-preservation means first the preservation of the individual, and this gives the function of nutrition. Secondly, it means preservation of the species, and this gives the function of propagation. The lowest grade in the organic kingdom will, therefore, be{297}those organisms whose sole functions are to nourish themselves, grow, and propagate their kind. These are plants. And we may sum up this by saying that plants possess the nutritive soul. Aristotle intended to write a treatise upon plants, which intention, however, he never carried out. All that we have from him on plants is scattered references in his other books. Had the promised treatise been forthcoming, we cannot doubt what its plan would have been. Aristotle would have shown, as he did in the case of animals, that there are higher and lower grades of organism within the plant kingdom, and he would have attempted to trace the development in detail through all the then known species of plants.
Next above plants in the scale of being come animals. Since the higher always contains the lower, but exhibits a further realization of form peculiar to itself, animals share with plants the functions of nutrition and propagation. What is peculiar to them, the point in which they rise above plants, is the possession of sensation. Sense-perception is therefore the special function of animals, and they possess, therefore, the nutritive and the sensitive souls. With sensation come pleasure and pain, for pleasure is a pleasant sensation, and pain the opposite. Hence arises the impulse to seek the pleasant and avoid the painful. This can only be achieved by the power of movement. Most animals, accordingly, have the power of locomotion, which is not possessed by plants, because they do not require it, since they are not sensitive to pleasure and pain. In his books upon animals Aristotle attempts to carry out the principle of development in detail, showing what are the higher, and what the lower, animal organisms. This he connects with the{298}methods of propagation employed by different animals. Sex-generation is the mark of a higher organism than parthenogenesis.
The scale of being proceeds from animals to man. The human organism, of course, contains the principles of all lower organisms. Man nourishes himself, grows, propagates his kind, moves about, and is endowed with sense-perception. But he must have in addition his own special function, which constitutes his advance beyond the animals. This is reason. Reason is the essential, the proper end and activity of man. His soul is nutritive, sensitive, and rational. In man, therefore, the world-reason which could only appear in inorganic matter as gravitation and levitation, in plants as nutrition, in animals as sensation, appears at last in its own proper form, as what it essentially is, reason. The world-reason, so long struggling towards the light, has reached it, has become actual, has become existent, in man. The world-process has attained its proximate end.
Within human consciousness there are lower and higher grades, and Aristotle has taken great pains to trace these from the bottom to the top. These stages of consciousness are what are ordinarily called "faculties." But Aristotle notes that it is nonsense to talk, as Plato did, of the "parts" of the soul. The soul, being a single indivisible being, has no parts. They are different aspects of the activity of one and the same being; different stages of its development. They can no more be separated than the convex and concave aspects of a curve. The lowest faculty, if we must use that word, is sense-perception. Now what we perceive in a thing is its qualities. Perception tells us that a piece of gold is{299}heavy, yellow, etc. The underlying substratum which supports the qualities cannot be perceived. This means that the matter is unknowable, the form knowable, for the qualities are part of the form. Sense-perception, therefore, takes place when the object stamps its form upon the soul. This is important for what it implies rather than what it states. It shows the thoroughly idealistic trend of Aristotle's thought. For if the form is what is knowable in a thing, the more form there is, the more knowable it will be. Absolute form, God, will be the absolutely knowable. That the Absolute is what alone is completely knowable, intelligible, and comprehensible, and the finite and material comparatively unknowable, is a point of view essential to idealism, and stands in marked contrast to the popular idea of rationalism that the Absolute is unknowable, and matter knowable. For idealism, the Absolute is reason, thought. What can be more thoroughly intelligible than reason? What can thought understand, if not thought? This, of course, is not stated by Aristotle. But it is implied in his theory of sense-perception.
Next in the scale above the senses comes the common sense. This has nothing to do with what we understand by that phrase in every-day language. It means the central sensation-ganglion in which isolated sensations meet, are combined, and form a unity of experience. We saw, in considering Plato, that the simplest kind of knowledge, such as, "this paper is white," involves, not only isolated sensations, but their comparison and contrast. Bare sensations would not even make objects. For every object is a combined bundle of sensations. What thus combines the various sensations, and in{300}particular those received from different sense-organs, what compares and contrasts them, and turns them from a blind medley of phantasms into a definite experience, a single cosmos, is the common sense. Its organ is the heart.
Above the common sense is the faculty of imagination. By this Aristotle means, not the creative imagination of the artist, but the power, which everyone possesses, of forming mental images and pictures. This is due to the excitation in the sense-organ continuing after the object has ceased to affect it.
The next faculty is memory. This is the same as imagination, except that there is combined with the image a recognition of it as a copy of a past sense-impression.
Recollection, again, is higher than memory. Memory images drift purposelessly through the mind. Recollection is the deliberate evoking of memory-images.
From recollection we pass to the specifically human faculty of reason. But reason itself has two grades. The lower is called passive reason, the higher active reason. The mind has the power of thought before it actually thinks. This latent capacity is passive reason. The mind is here like a smooth piece of wax which has the power to receive writing, but has not received it. The positive activity of thought itself is active reason. The comparison with wax must not mislead us into supposing that the soul only receives its impressions from sensation. It is pure thought which writes upon the wax.
Now the sum of the faculties in general we call the soul. And the soul, we saw, is simply the organization{301}or form, of the body. As form is inseparable from matter, the soul cannot exist without the body. It is the function of the body. It is to the body what sight is to the eye. And in the same sense Aristotle denies the doctrine of Pythagoras and Plato that the soul reincarnates itself in new bodies, particularly in the bodies of animals. What is the function of one thing cannot become the function of another. Exactly what the soul is to the body the music of the flute is to the flute itself. It is the form of which the flute is the matter. It is, to speak metaphorically, the soul of the flute. And you might as well talk, says Aristotle, of the art of flute-playing becoming reincarnate in the blacksmith's anvil, as of the soul passing into another body. This would seem also to preclude any doctrine of immortality. For the function perishes with the thing. We shall return to that point in a moment. But we may note, meanwhile, that Aristotle's theory of the soul is not only a great advance upon Plato's, but is a great advance upon popular thinking of the present day. The ordinary view of the soul, which was Plato's view, is that the soul is a sort of thing. No doubt it is non-material and supersensuous. But still it is a thing; it can be put into a body and taken out of it, as wine can be put into or taken out of a bottle. The connection between body and soul is thus purely mechanical. They are attached to each other by no necessary bond, but rather by force. They have, in their own natures, no connexion with each other, and it is difficult to see why the soul ever entered a body, if it is in its nature something quite separate. But Aristotle's view is that the soul, as form of the body, is not separable from it. You cannot have{302}a soul without a body. The connection between them is not mechanical, but organic. The soul is not a thing which comes into the body and goes out of it. It is not a thing at all. It is a function.
But to this doctrine Aristotle makes an exception in favour of the active reason. All the lower faculties perish with the body, including the passive reason. Active reason is imperishable and eternal. It has neither beginning nor end. It comes into the body from without, and departs from it at death. God being absolute reason, man's reason comes from God, and returns to him, after the body ceases to function. But before we hail this as a doctrine of personal immortality, we had best reflect. All the lower faculties perish at death, and this includes memory. Now memory is an essential of personality. Without memory our experiences would be a succession of isolated sensations, with no connecting link. What connects my last with my present experience is that my last experience was "mine." To be mine it must be remembered. Memory is the string upon which isolated experiences are strung together, and which makes them into that unity I call myself, my personality. If memory perishes, there can be no personal life. And it must be remembered that Aristotle does not mean merely that, in that future life--if we persist in calling it such--the memory of this life is obliterated. He means that in the future life itself reason has no memory of itself from moment to moment. We cannot be dogmatic about what Aristotle himself thought. He seems to avoid the question. He probably shrank from disturbing popular beliefs on the subject. We have, at any rate, no definite pronouncement from{303}him. All we can say is that his doctrine does not provide the material for belief in personal immortality. It expressly removes the material in that it denies the persistence of memory. Moreover, if Aristotle really thought that reason is a thing, which goes in and out of the body, an exception, in the literal sense, to his general doctrine of soul, all we can say is that he undergoes a sudden drop in the philosophic scale. Having propounded so advanced a theory, he sinks back to the crude view of Plato. And as this is not likely, the most probable explanation is that he is here speaking figuratively, perhaps with the intention of propitiating the religious and avoiding any rude disturbance of popular belief. If so, the statements that active reason is immortal, comes from God, and returns to God, mean simply that the world-reason is eternal, and that man's reason is the actualization of this eternal reason, and in that sense "comes from God" and returns to Him. We may add, too, that since God, though real, is not to be regarded as an existent individual, our return to Him cannot be thought as a continuation of individual existence. Personal immortality is inconsistent with the fundamentals of Aristotle's system. We ought not to suppose that he contradicted himself in this way. Yet if Aristotle used language which seems to imply personal immortality, this is neither meaningless nor dishonest. It is as true for him as for others that the soul is eternal. But eternal does not mean everlasting in time. It means timeless. And reason, even our reason, is timeless. The soul has eternity in it. It is "eternity in an hour." And it is this which puts the difference between man and the brutes.
{304}
We have traced the scale of being from inorganic matter, through plants and animals, to man. What then? What is the next step? Or does the scale stop there? Now there is a sort of break in Aristotle's system at this point, which has led many to say that man is the top of the scale. The rest of Aristotle's physics deal with what is outside our earth, such as the stars and planets. And they deal with them quite as if they were a different subject, having little or nothing to do with the terrestrial scale of being which we have been considering. But here we must not forget two facts. The first is that Aristotle's writings have come down to us mutilated, and in many cases unfinished. The second is that Aristotle had a curious habit of writing separate monographs on different parts of his system, and omitting to point out any connexion between them, although such a connexion undoubtedly exists.
Now although Aristotle himself does not say it, there are several good reasons for thinking that the true interpretation of his meaning is that the scale of being does not stop at man, that there is no gap in the chain here, but that it proceeds from man through planets and stars--which Aristotle, like Plato, regarded as divine beings--right up to God himself. In the first place, this is required by the logic of his system. The scale has formless matter at the bottom and matterless form at the top. It should proceed direct from one to the other. It is essential to his philosophy that the universe is a single continuous chain. There is no place for such a hiatus between man and the higher beings. Secondly, it is not as if terrestrial life formed a scale, and celestial beings were all on a par, having among themselves no{305}scale of higher and lower. This is not the case. The heavenly bodies have grades among themselves. The higher are related to the lower as form to matter. Thus stars are higher than planets. So that if we suppose that evolution stops at man, what we have is a gap in the middle, a scale below it, and a scale above it. It is like a bridge over a sheet of water, the two ends of which are intact, but which is broken down in the middle. The natural completion of this scheme involves the filling up of the gap. Thirdly, we have another very important piece of evidence. With his valuable idea of evolution Aristotle combined another very curious, and no doubt, absurd, theory. This was that in the scale of the universe the lowest existence is to be found in the middle, the highest at the periphery, and that in general the higher is always outside the lower, so that the spatial universe is a system of concentric spheres, the outer sphere being related to the inner sphere as higher to lower, as form to matter. At the centre of the spherical universe is our earth. Earth, as the lowest element, is in the middle. Then comes a layer of water, then of air, then of fire. Among the heavenly bodies there are fifty-six spheres. The stars are outside the planets and are therefore higher beings. And in conformity with this scheme, the supreme being, God, is outside the outermost sphere. Now it is obvious that, in this scheme, the passage from the centre of the earth to the stars forms a spatial continuity, and it is impossible to resist the conclusion that it also forms a logical continuity, that is, that there is no break in the chain of evolution.
Noting that this is not what Aristotle in so many words says, but that it is our interpretation of his{306}intention, which is almost certainly correct, we conclude that man is not the top of the scale. Next to him come the heavenly bodies. The planets include the sun and the moon, which, revolve round the earth in a direction opposite to that of the stars. Next in the scale come the stars. We need not go into details of the fifty-six spheres. The stars and planets are divine beings. But this is only a comparative term. Man, as the possessor of reason, is also divine, but the heavenly bodies infinitely more so. And this means that they are more rational than man, and so higher in the scale. They live an absolutely blessed and perfect life. They are immortal and eternal, because they are the supreme self-realization of the eternal reason. It is only upon this earth that death and corruption occur, a circumstance which has no doubt emphasized that view of Aristotle's philosophy which holds the gap between man and the stars to be a real one. The heavenly bodies are not composed of the four elements, but of a fifth, a quintessence, which is called ether. Like all elements it must have its natural motion. And as it is the finest and most perfect, its motion must be perfect. And it must be an eternal motion, because the stars are eternal beings. It cannot be motion in a straight line, because that never comes to an end, and so is never perfect. Circular motion alone is perfect. And it is eternal because its end and its beginning are one. Hence the natural motion of ether is circular, and the stars move in perfect circles.
Leaving the stars behind, we reach the summit of the long ladder from matter to form. This is the absolute form, God. As formless matter is not an existent thing, nor is matterless form. God, therefore, is not in the{307}world of space and time at all. But it is one of the curiosities of thought that Aristotle nevertheless gives him a place outside the outermost sphere. What is outside the sphere is, therefore, not space. All space and time are inside this globular universe. Space is therefore finite. And God must be outside the outermost sphere because he is the highest being, and the higher always comes outside the lower.
We have now described the entire scale of evolution. Looking back upon it, we can see its inner significance. The Absolute is reason, matterless form. Everything in the world, therefore, is, in its essence, reason. If we wish to know the essential nature even of this clod of earth, the answer is that it is reason, although this view is not consistently developed by Aristotle, since he allows that matter is a separate principle which cannot be reduced to form. The whole universal process of things is nothing but the struggle of reason to express itself, to actualize itself, to become existent in the world. This it definitely does, for the first time proximately in man, and completely in the stars. It can only express itself in lower beings as sensation (animals), as nutrition (plants), or as gravitation and its opposite (inorganic matter).
The value of Aristotle's theory of evolution is immense. It is not the details that signify. The application of the principle in the world of matter and life could not be carried out satisfactorily in the then state of physical science. It could not be carried out with perfection even now. Omniscience alone could give finality to such a scheme. But it is the principle itself which matters. And that it is one of the most valuable conceptions in{308}philosophy will perhaps be more evident if we compare it, firstly, with modern scientific theories of evolution and secondly, with certain aspects of Hindu pantheism.
What has Aristotle in common with such a writer a Herbert Spencer? According to Spencer, evolution is a movement from the indefinite, incoherent, and homogeneous, to the definite, coherent, and heterogeneous. Aristotle has all this, though his words are different. He calls it a movement from matter to form. Form he describes as whatever gives definiteness to a thing. Matter is the indefinite substrate, form gives it definiteness. Hence for him too the higher being is more definite because it has more form. That matter is the homogeneous, form the heterogeneous, follows from this. We saw that there are in matter itself no differences, because there are no qualities. And this is the same as saying it is homogeneous. Heterogeneity, that is, differentiation, is introduced by form. Coherence is the same thing as organization. Aristotle has himself defined the form of a thing as its organization. For him, as for Spencer, the higher being is simply that which is more organized. Every theory of evolution depends fundamentally upon the idea of organism. Aristotle invented the idea and the word. Spencer carried it no further, though the more advanced physical knowledge of his day enabled him to illustrate it more copiously.
But of course the great difference between Aristotle and the moderns, is that the former did not guess, what the latter have discovered, namely that evolution is not only a logical development, but is a fact in time. Aristotle knew what was meant by the higher and lower organism as well as Darwin, but he did not know, that the latter{309}actually turns into the former in the course of years. But this, though the most obvious, is not really the most important difference between Spencer and Aristotle. The real difference is that Aristotle penetrated far more deeply into the philosophy of evolution than modern science does; that, in fact, modern science has no philosophy of evolution at all. For the fundamental problem here is, if we speak of higher and lower beings, what rational ground have we for calling them higher and lower? That the lower passes in time into the higher is no doubt a very interesting fact to discover, but it dwindles into insignificance beside the problem just indicated, because, on the solution of that problem it depends whether the universe is to be regarded as futile, meaningless, and irrational, or whether we are to see in it order, plan, and purpose. Is Spencer's doctrine a theory of development at all? Or is it not rather simply a theory of change? Something resembling an ape becomes a man. Is there development here, that is, is it a movement from something really lower to something really higher? Or is it merely change from one indifferent thing to another? Is there improvement, or only difference? In the latter case, it makes not the slightest difference whether the ape becomes man, or man becomes an ape. The one is as good as the other. In either case, it is merely a change from Tweedledum to Tweedledee. The change is meaningless, and has no significance.
The modern doctrine of evolution can only render the world more intelligible, can only develop into a philosophy of evolution, by showing that there is evolution and not merely change, and this it can only do by{310}giving a rational basis for the belief that some forms of existence are higher than others. To put the matter bluntly, why is a man higher than a horse, or a horse than a sponge? Answer that, and you have a philosophy of evolution. Fail to answer it, and you have none. Now the man in the street will say that man is higher than the horse, because he not merely eats grass, but thinks, deliberates, possesses art, science, religion, morality. Ask him why these things are higher than eating grass, and he has no answer. From him, then, we turn to Spencer, and there we find a sort of answer. Man is higher because he is more organized. But why is it better to be more organized? Science, as such, has no answer. If pressed in this way, science may of course turn round and say: "there is in the reality of things no higher and no lower; what I mean by higher and lower is simply more and less organized; higher and lower are mere metaphors; they are the human way of looking at things; we naturally call higher what is nearest ourselves; but from the absolute point of view there is no higher and lower." But this is to reduce the universe to a madhouse. It means that there is no purpose, no reason, in anything that happens. The universe, in this case, is irrational. No explanation of it is possible. Philosophy is futile, and not only philosophy, but morality and everything else. If there is really no higher and lower, there is no better and no worse. It is just as good to be a murderer as to be a saint. Evil is the same as good. Instead of striving to be saints, statesmen, philosophers, we may as well go and play marbles, because all these values of higher and lower are mere delusions, "the human way of looking at things."
{311}
Spencer then has no answer to the question why it is better to be more organized. So we turn at last to Aristotle. He has an answer. He sees that it is meaningless to talk of development, advance, higher and lower, except in relation to an end. There is no such thing as advance unless it is an advance towards something. A body moving purposelessly in a straight line through infinite space does not advance. It might as well be here as a mile hence. In either case it is no nearer to anything. But if it is moving towards a definite point, we can call this advance. Every mile it moves it gets nearer to its end. So, if we are to have a philosophy of evolution, it must be teleological. If nature is not advancing towards an end, there is no nearer and further, no higher and lower, no development. What then is the end? It is the actualization of reason, says Aristotle. The primal being is eternal reason, but this is not existent. It must come to exist. It first enunciates itself vaguely as gravitation. But this is far off from its end, which is the existence of reason, as such, in the world. It comes nearer in plants and animals. It is proximately reached in man, for man is the existent reason. But there is no question of the universe coming to a stop, when it reaches its end--(the usual objection to teleology). For the absolute end, absolute form, can never be reached. The higher is thus the more rational, the lower the less rational. Now if we try to go on asking, "why is it better to be more rational?" we find we cannot ask such a question. The word "why" means that we want a reason. And our question is absurd because we are asking a reason for reason. Why is it better to be rational means simply, "how is reason rational." To{312}doubt it is a self-contradiction. Or, to put the same thing in another way, reason is the Absolute. And to ask why it is better to be rational is to demand that the ultimate should be expressed in terms of something beyond it. Hence modern science has no philosophy of evolution, whereas Aristotle has. [Footnote 16]
[Footnote 16: See H. S. Macran'sHegel's Doctrine of Formal Logic(Clarendon Press), Introduction, section on the Conception of Evolution, to which I am much indebted in the above paragraphs.]
The main idea of pantheism is that everything is God. The clod of earth is divine because it is a manifestation of Deity. Now this idea is all very well, and is in fact essential to philosophy. We find it in Aristotle himself, since the entire world is, for him, the actualization of reason, and reason is God. But this is also a very dangerous idea, if not supplemented by a rationally grounded scale of values. No doubt everything is, in a sense, God. But if we leave it at this, it would follow that, since everything is equally divine, there is no higher and lower. If the clod of earth, like the saintliest man, is God, and there is no more to say of the matter, then how is the saint higher than the clod of earth? Why should one ever struggle towards higher things, when in reality all are equally high? Why avoid evil, when evil is as much a manifestation of God as good? Mere pantheism must necessarily end in this calamitous view. And these deplorable effects explain the fact that Hinduism, with all its high thinking, finds room for the worship of cows and snakes, and, with all its undoubted moral elevation, yet allows into its fold the grossest abominations. Both these features are due to the pantheistic placing of all things on a par as equally{313}divine. Not of course that Hinduism has not a sort of doctrine of evolution, a belief in a higher and lower. As everyone knows, it admits the belief that in successive incarnations the soul may mount higher and higher till it perhaps rejoins the common source of all things. There is probably no race of man so savage that it does not instinctively feel that there is a higher and lower, a better and worse, in things. But the point is that, although Hinduism has its scale of values, and its doctrine of development, it has no rational foundation for these, and though it has the idea of higher and lower, yet, because this is without foundation, it lets it slip, it never grips the idea, and so easily slides into the view that all is equally divine. The thought that all is God, and the thought that there are higher and lower beings, are, on the surface, opposed and inconsistent theories. Yet both are necessary, and it is the business of philosophy to find a reconciliation. This Aristotle does, but Hinduism fails to do. It asserts both, but fails to bring them to unity. Now it asserts one view, and again at another time it asserts the other. And this, of course, is connected with the general defect of oriental thinking, its vagueness. Everything is seen, but seen in a haze, in which all things appear one, in which shapes flow into another, in which nothing has an outline, in which even vital distinctions are obliterated. Hence it is that, though oriental thought contains, in one way or another, practically all philosophical ideas, it grips none, and can hold nothing fast. It seizes its object, but its flabby grasp relaxes and slips off. Hinduism, like modern science, has its doctrine of evolution. But it has no philosophy of evolution.