an adequate realization of the reasonable nature of man. Hence philosophy has constant relations with all departments of human thought and action; or rather they all, with their several methods and ideals, come to enrich and stimulate philosophy, whilst philosophy, in return, reacts upon them all, by clarifying and harmonizing them each with itself and each with all the others.
There is, next, the constant conviction of the reality of moral accountableness on the one hand, and of the strength of the passions and of the allurements of sense on the other, of the costing ethical character of the search for light and truth, of the ceaseless necessity of a turning of the whole man, of conversion. “As the bodily eye cannot turn from darkness to light without the turning of the whole body, so too when the eye of the soul is turned round, the whole soul must be turned from the world of generation unto that of Being, and become able to endure the sight of Being, and of the brightest and best part of Being, that is to say of the Good.”[2] Hence Philosophy is a Redemption, a Liberation, a Separation of the soul from the body, a Dying and seeking after death, a constant Purification and Recollection of the soul; and the four Cardinal Virtues are so many purifications;[3] and men who have once come to lay the blame of their own confusion and perplexity upon themselves, will hate themselves and escape from themselves into Philosophy, in order to become different and get rid of their former selves.[4]
There is, in the third place, the dominant consciousness of Multiplicity in Unity and of Unity in Multiplicity, and of the necessity of the soul’s ever moving from one to the other—moving out of itself and into the world of Multiplicity, of sense and exterior work; and moving back into itself, into the world of Unity, of spirit and interior rest. Hence there is and ought to be a double movement of the soul. And this double action does not continue on the same plane, but the moving, oscillating soul is, according to the faithful thoroughness or cowardly slackness of these its movements, ever either mounting higher in truth and spirit, or falling lower away into the sensual and untruthful. For these its ascensions are “effortful,” painful, gradual; they are never fully finished here below, and they nowhere attain to that absolute knowledge which is possessed by God alone.[5] “We ought,” he tells us, “to strive and fly as swiftly as possible from hence thither. And to fly thither is to become like God”; but he adds, “as far as this is possible.”[6]
And there is, lastly, an unfailing faith in an unexhausted, inexhaustible, transcendent world of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, which gives of itself, but never gives itself wholly, to that phenomenal world which exists only by participation in it; and in a Supreme Goodness, felt and half conceived to be personal and self-communicative, as the cause of all that is anywhere beautiful and one and good.
These four characteristics of Universality, Conversion, Unification, Transcendence, we find them together in Greek philosophy once, and once only, namely in Plato. Twice again we have indeed a world-embracing, world-moving scheme placed before us, and in each case two of these four characteristics reappear in a deepened and developed form. For Aristotle works out, more fully and satisfactorily than Plato, the characters of Universality and of Unification; especially does the latter find a great improvement. And Plotinus insists, even more constantly and movingly than Plato, upon Conversion as a necessary means, and upon Transcendence as a necessary characteristic of all true philosophy. But Aristotle has lost the Conversion from out of his scheme, and also the Transcendence conceived as at the same time immanent in the world; and Plotinus has lost the Universality, and the Unification conceived as a Unity in Multiplicity.
4. In Aristotle.
As to Aristotle, the improvements upon Plato are marked and many. There is the doctrine of the non-existence of the General apart from the Particular; the doctrine of Matter as not simple Non-Being, but as Not-yet-Being, the Possible, the Not-yet-Actual, which is waiting the presence of the Form to give it the Actuality for which it is destined, since Matter requires Form, and Form requires Matter; and the doctrine, here first fully developed, of Motion, the Moved and the Moving.
Since all Motion, Change, Natural Life spring from Form (and a particular Form), working in and with Matter (a particular and appropriate Matter), the ultimate First Moving Cause must Itself be all-moving and all-unmoved, that is, it must be Pure Form. We thus get the first at all adequate philosophical presentation of Theism: for this Pure Form is then shown to be eternal, unchanging, all thought, self-thinking, and absolutely distinct from the world which it moves. In all other real Beings the Form has, in various degrees, to contend with the manifold impediments of Matter; and in proportion to the Form’s success, does the resultant Being stand high in the scale of Creation. The plant, with its vegetative and plastic soul, stands lowest in the scale of organic life; next comes the animal, with its sensitive and motive soul; and highest stands man, with his rational and volitional soul. And each higher Being takes over, as the lower part of his own nature, the functions and powers of the lower Being; and hence, since all Beings constitute so many several parts of the world’s systematic whole, they are all deserving of the closest study. And Man, destined to be the highest constituent of this whole, can become so only by moving as much as may be out of his entanglement in the lower, the passive functions of his soul, and identifying himself with his true self, with that active power, that pure reason which, itself pure Form, finds its proper objects in the Forms of all things that are.
Thus we get a system of a certain grand consistency and an impressively constant re-application of certain fundamental ideas to every kind of subject-matter. But the Platonic Dualism, though everywhere vigorously attacked, is yet nowhere fully overcome.
For in Metaphysics, Plato’s “One alongside of the Many” becomes with Aristotle the “One throughout the Many”: to the mind of the latter, the Separate General, Pure Form as existing without Matter, is a mere abstraction; Matter without Form is a simple potentiality; Matter and Form together, and they only, constitute the Particular, and (in and by it) all actual and full Reality. And only Reality, in the highest and primary sense, can, according to him, form the highest and primary object of Knowledge. Yet knowledge never refers to the Particular, but always to the General; and, in the Particular, only to the General manifested in it. And this is the case, not because, though the Particular is the fuller Reality, we can more easily reach the General within it; but, on the contrary, because, though we can more easily reach the Particular, the General alone is abiding and fully true and really knowable.
Again, for Aristotle the Particular, which alone really exists, is constituted a particular and really existent Being, in virtue of its participation in Matter; but it is constituted as abiding, true, and knowable, in virtue of its Form. The cause of its Reality is thus different from that of its Truth; the addition of the simple Potentiality of Matter has alone given Reality to the pure Actuality of Form.
Finally, for Aristotle all Movement, as comprehensive of every kind of change, being defined as the transition from Potentiality to Reality, as the determination of Matter by Form, can be called forth, in the last resort, only by a pure Form which, though the cause of all Motion, is itself unmoved, is pure Thought and Speculation, a thinking of thinking,—God eternally thinking God and Himself alone. Yet this God is, if thus safely distinguished from the world, yet hardly more Personal than Spirit was in Anaxagoras, or the Idea of Good was in Plato. For not only does Aristotle refuse Him a body and all psychic life, but with them he eliminates all Doing and all Producing, all Emotion and all Willing, indeed all Thinking except that of His own lonely Self-Contemplation. And yet the activity of the will is as essential to Personality as that of thinking; and thinking again we can conceive as personal only if conditioned by a diversity of objects and a variety of mental states. And this God’s relations with the world are strangely few and still curiously materialistic. For He but sets the world in motion, and has no special care for it or detailed rule over it; and since, of the three or four kinds of motion, spacial motion is declared to be the primary one, and its most perfect form to be the circular, and since a circle moves quickest at its circumference, He is conceived as imparting to the world a spacial and a circular movement, and this, apparently, from a point in space, since He does so from outside. His transcendence is, so far, but a spacial one.
In Physics, Aristotle still constantly describes Nature as an harmonious, reasonable Being, an all-effecting force. There is here a mythical strain at work, and yet nowhere is a subject clearly