Philosophical Review

The Theory of God in Book Λ of Aristotle's Metaphysics

Author(s): B. A. G. Fuller
Source: The Philosophical Review, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Mar., 1907), pp. 170-183
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical Review
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 THE THEORY OF GOD IN BOOK A OF

ARISTOTLE'S METAPHYSICS.

THE present paper is an impression of those sections of the

Eleventh Book of the Metaphysics in which Aristotle
treats of the nature of God. The passages with which the com-
ment is concerned follow upon an argument in which Aristotle
seeks to show that both the fact of motion as apparently involving
an infinite regress, and its nature, definable alike in alteration and
locomotion as a transition from the relatively potential to the
relatively actual, are ultimately explicable only on the assump-
tion of a first, absolutely actual, and unmoved cause.
The description of the nature of this prime mover is given us
by Aristotle in Sections 7, 9, and IO, of Book A. " Upon such
a principle," he proceeds in Sec. 7,1 " depend heaven and nature.
Its life is like that best life which we for a brief space sometimes
live. This life it lives eternally (which is beyond our power).
And the reason that its life is such is that its very operation is
pleasure. Hence it is that consciousness, perception, thought are
pleasurable to the highest degree, and so hopes and memories.
But the absolute thought is of the absolutely best, the highest
thought of the highest object. The intellect thinks itself in
grasping the intelligible, since in the act of touching and know-
ing its object it becomes intelligible. Therefore the intellect and
the intelligible are the same. For that which can receive the in-
telligible and essence is the intellect, and its operation lies in pos-
sessing the intelligible. It follows that the object rather than the
power of thought is that which is divine in the intellect, and that
the contemplation thereof is supremely pleasurable and good. If,
then, that happiness which is ours sometimes is God's always, it
is a marvellous thing; if a greater happiness, it is still more
marvellous. And this is the case. Life also is his, for the opera-
tion of the intellect is life, and he is that operation; andchis
operation of reason in and for itself is life supremely good and

1 Met., 1072b I4 et seq.

I70

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 GOD IN ARISTOTLE'S METAPHYSICS. 7I

eternal. We say, then, that God is living, eternal, supremely

good. Hence life and existence continuous and eternal are
God's, for God is these things."
In Sec. 9 the argument is further developed. Certain diffi-
culties at once arise, Aristotle tells us, regarding the conception
of this divine intellect. It must think of something, else it is no
better than a man asleep. But if it thinks of something, of what
does it think, and after what fashion? Clearly a divine intellect
cannot think now about one thing and now about another. It
can think only of what is most divine and lofty, and this steadily
" without change or shadow of turning." Moreover, the essence
of such an intellect must be the very operation rather than any
mere faculty of thought. Were it not, it might conceivably
weary of thinking, and in any case would find the justification of
its operation in the object of its thought rather than in itself.
For all these reasons, Aristotle concludes that " the intellect
thinks itself, if it is the most excellent of things, and that its
thinking is thinking of thinking." But he goes on to explain:
" It is plain that science and opinion and thought are always of
something other than themselves, and of themselves only acci-
dentally. Still, if thinking and being thought are different, by
virtue of which is worth attributed to the reason ? For, in that
case, to be thinking and to be thought will not be the same.
The fact is that in some cases a science is its own subject. In
the case of the arts, immaterial substances and essences are the
subject, in the speculative sciences, ideas and thinking. But'
now, since the object thought and the thought of the object are
not different in cases where matter is not involved, they will be
identical, and thought will be one with its object."
Aristotle then takes up the other question, the question of the
way in which the divine intellect knows itself, enlarging upon the
point already made that its knowledge cannot be discursive, but
is steady and without change or process. " There is," he says,
" yet another perplexity, -the difficulty whether the object of
thought be manifold. If it were, there might be change among
the parts. But we must say that immaterial things are indi-
visible. And just as is the condition of the human reason, or of

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 I72 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [VOL. XVI.

any reason which synthesizes the manifold in some one moment

of time, grasping, as a reason so constituted must, the good not
in this or that moment, but the sovereign good, in a certain
wholeness of time, -such, I say, is the condition of the divine
thinking of itself, throughout all eternity."
At first sight these passages seem mystical enough; especially
such phrases as "the intellect thinks itself in grasping the intel-
ligible," and "thinking is thinking of thinking." But Aristotle,
we may be sure, was far from intending them mystically. And
it behooves us to see whether they be not capable of interpreta-
tion in clear and reasonable terms. To this end we shall do well
to consider, first, the relation which Aristotle conceives the divine
intellect to bear to its object, and secondly, what he conceives
that object to be.
The first point, I think, offers no special difficulty, but is cleared
of its apparent mysticism by our own modern epistemological
doctrine. To the question, 'What is truth?' we to-day reply
that truth is not an outer or an alien object into correspondence
with which our minds bring themselves, but rather something in-
ternal to the reason and expressive of its nature. Truth is the
ideal of rational activity; in attaining it, reason is only realizing
itself. Apart from a reason which thinks and intends it, truth
as such would have no existence; and, conversely, apart from
the truth which it thinks, reason could not exist. Take from it
that rational organization of things which is its object and com-
plement, and there is left precisely as much, for example, as when
you empty sense of the sensuous, consciousness of its content,
clouds of their rain. The intellect then is the intelligible, as
Aristotle says. Moreover, it is " the intelligible rather than the
intellect which would appear to be the divine part of the mind."
For it is the content of consciousness which gives consciousness
its value and justification. Reason means no more than that
there is a rational order in experience. Apart from that order it
is meaningless.
In like manner, in the divine mind the thinker and the thought
are one. The thinker merely states and guarantees the fact that
the thought exists. The thought tells us what it is that exists.

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 No. 2.] GOD IN ARISTOTLE'S METAPHYSICS. I73

That the divine intellect thinks itself in thinking the intelligible,

will signify, then, simply that there exists an experience of a
certain definite essence or character.
We must, however, exclude from our conception of the nature
of the divine experience all idea of self-consciousness, in the sense
of personal self-consciousness. God embodies or enacts the ideal
operation of the reason. But the character of this ideal opera-
tion Aristotle finds revealed in those moments of our own thought
when we are most engrossed, and least aware of the ' fringe' of
extraneous consciousness or of supererogatory reflection upon
the fact of our own absorption. And the ideal itself would be
attained precisely when that awareness of a 'fringe,' and that
' knowing that I know' disappeared completely in the all-absorb-
ing interest of the object of vision or meditation; when, in a
word, my thought was so abandoned to its object that it, nay that
I, meant no more than that the object was incandescent with
existence and value.
Such is the divine experience. In that profound meditation
upon itself in which the life of God consists, that accurate focus
of thought upon and complete absorption in its object which is
the perfection of rational thinking, is a realized fact. God knows
only himself, with a knowledge in which there is distinction
neither of self from not-self, nor of the activity of thought as such
from its content, -two distinctions which are indispensable con-
ditions of personal self-consciousness.
With us the moments of such self-transcendence and union
with the object of our thought are fleeting and abortive, but with
God the moment is as eternal as the identity is complete. By
this we are to understand not that God's self-meditation endures
through endless time, but rather that it is independent of the
conditions of time altogether. The eternal for Aristotle, as for
many modern theories, is that in dealing with which we need
take no account of time. The laws of nature, for example, we
call eternal laws; that is, in the laws of nature we have a descrip-
tion of phenomena which is capable of abstraction from temporal
relations. They are exemplified in time, indeed, but their vitality
is drawn from a sphere quite outside of time, the sphere of logical

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174 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vol,. XVI.

order and connection. They are the result of an express inten-

tention to rise above one and all moments into a world of logical
sequences and permanent aspects existing in no one instant, but
'good' for and applicable to all moments.
Such a world is the mind of God. Its content, that is, itself,
is a logical content of pure thought. The matter of our experi-
ence is given from moment to moment, and we must perforce
compose the manifold of its temporal succession and discover its
structure and meaning by attention to the monotonies in a process
of endless reiteration. But God is, as it were, eternally complete.
He is simply what he is, one fact or act of thought into whose
being and consideration time does not enter.
This ' eternal' act of thought, however, is not vapid or color-
less. Like those 'best moments' of our own self-forgetfulness
in the presence of an absorbing object, it is supremely pleasurable.
God not only exists, he lives. What makes life worth living is
not its quantity but its quality, and the happiness which we pick
bit by bit from the passing years is gathered up and enjoyed by
him in the felicity of that single and final act of consummate
vision which enshrines the sovereign good of the rational will.
Than such vision there is for Aristotle no higher or more joyous
life. The contemplation of truth is life; it has within it all that
goes to make up a life, the activity, the happiness, the complete-
ness. Truth, as we say, is a living truth; it is what is vital and
permanent in things. The value of truth and of knowing it is
vindicated in God, - the greatest of all philosophers.
So much by way of interpretation of the form of the divine
knowledge. We pass now to the second point, and ask, What
is its object? The answer seems ready. God, says Aristotle,
knows himself. God is the perfect operation of thought in and
for itself, and hence his thinking is thinking about thinking.
N6orte voasioj vo?qt. But this answer, on closer scrutiny, car-
ries us nowhere except into the midst of a war of commentators.
Thinking, we at once ask, about thinking what? and the battle
is on.
A suggestion which immediately offers itself to us as plausible,
in view of the foregoing discussion about the form of the divine

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No. 2.] GOD IN ARISTOTLE'S METAPHYSICS. 175

thought, is that the object of the divine knowledge, i. e., God

himself, is really nothing but absolute truth. As we saw, Aristotle,
in his conception of the modus operandi of the divine intellect,
appears to have in mind the relations of the human reason to its
object. Now the human reason has for an ideal nothing short
of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But
its attainment of this ideal would mean its own expansion into
an absolute reason, whose single, immutable act of thought should
once and for all enshrine the logical system of forms and rela-
tions which we call truth. Such a reason would be the absolute
form of the world. It would mean merely the self-knowledge
of the formal and intelligible, the self-existence of the vision sub
specie Wernitatis. We are tempted, then, to say that the Aris-
totelian God, actually realizing as he does the formal conditions
of such a reason, embodies also its matter; that is, that he is the
intelligible order or truth of things incompletely reasoned out by
us, guaranteeing its existence as a fact already tIere in its com-
pleteness, prior logically to its inadequate embodiment in par-
ticular things and its imperfect operation in human reasons, and
drawing its vitality and validity from springs other than those of
human thought.
This view, which after some fashion conceives the object of the
divine knowledge to be the logical universe of interrelated forms,
has the support of some commentators; but by others it is re-
jected.' The latter contend that Aristotle means to exclude from
the mind of God not only all knowledge of particulars, but also of
all forms save his own. 1His form is the one pure form that there is,
different from every other form in that it is the form only of itself,
containing within itself the basis not only of its abstract but of
its concrete existence. And within this unique fact, all God's
life and thought are locked up. He knows nothing but it, nothing
but himself.
If this interpretation be correct, it is again not difficult to divine
what Aristotle has in mind. All ordinary forms or concepts are

1 For a discussion of this point, into a consideration of which it is not the inten-
tion of the present paper to enter, cf Zeller, Phil. der Gaiechen, Vol. II, 2, pp.
382 et sex.

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176 TIE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [VOL. XVI.

forms of something. They are found only in the particular ob-

jects which exemplify them, and from these particulars can never
be wholly extracted. However high their heads may be in the
clouds, their feet always must rest upon a basis of solid earth.
Or, to put it in psychological terms, we can never get a pure
concept. Abstract our thought as we may, we can never rid it
completely of an admixture of sense and fancy. It is tied to
experience by a thread of imagery which, however it may be
stretched and attenuated in its infinite elasticity, cannot be broken.
Now it is precisely this thread which Aristotle would appear to
be trying to break. As long as it is tied down by this reference,
however remote, to a sensible content, thought, as he apparently
holds, cannot realize its pure actuality. There is always some-
thing left for it to assimilate, a residuum which is not pure
thought. The ideal thought would be thought cut loose alto-
gether from the anchor of a sensible point of reference, and
thinking wholly and only of its character qua a mere thinking
process. So the ideal form would be a form not of sensible
particulars, but of a purely formal and abstract subject-matter.
It would be the form or concept of just the formal and conceptual
element in things. This ideal limit and standard of thought and
form must actually exist, Aristotle thinks, in order both to excite
that approach towards it which all thinking means in proportion
as it is rational, and to guarantee the validity of that approach by
assuring us of the reality of its goal.
It is not the purpose of this paper to attempt to decide in any
way between these rival interpretations. Personally, I incline to
agree with the latter view. But I cannot refrain from pointing
out that, whether or no it represent Aristotle's thought, it is
liable to a very obvious reductio ad absurdum. God's essence, we
are told, is thought of thought. But thought of thought of
what ? By draining thought and form of its filling of sensible
reference, we have apparently deprived it of all that gives it value
and relevance. It is reduced to mere reflection upon itself, with
no other self than the barren act of reflection to reflect upon.
It is thinking about thinking not that intelligible content, that
logical constitution of a sensible world, which alone gives thought

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No. 2.] GOD IN ARISTOTLE'S METAPHYSICS. I77

its dignity and worth, but about nothing but itself, - which with-
out that content is nothing. It is like consciousness without
anything but its mere name to be conscious of, and therefore
meaningless.
We leave, then, this perplexing question of the content of the
divine mind unsettled, and perhaps insoluble, and pass on to
consider certain aspects of the Aristotelian theology which bear
upon modern thought. In the first place, we have to note the
dualism of the Aristotelian teaching. However we may solve
the knotty problem of the content of the divine mind, there is no
doubt that we must exclude from it the whole phenomenal uni-
verse. That universe is the expression of another point of view,
of which we, qua imperfect mortal beings of sense and flesh, are
the vehicles. And as these points of view are distinct and op-
posed, so are their metaphysical bases. The one is in no wise
the substance or ground of the other. The two eyes of reason
and sense are, as it were, connected with different brains. Op-
posed to God, the pure form, stands 52R, 3'awie, the raw ma-
terial of existence, symbol of the fact that there is a condition of
things other than they appear to the divine insight, -if, indeed,
the universe be known under any aspect at all to God. Of this
otherness, of the mundane point of view with its categories of
generation, corruption, and motion, God is not even aware, much
less is he responsible for it. Even granting the contention that
he knows and constitutes the logical order of forms inherent in
the world, his vision of himself, to use a figure not entirely ade-
quate, is not of
"The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas,
the hills and the plains,"

but of the configurations of atoms in space. His experience is

not a panorama but a plan.
This dualism, viewed in the light of modern theories, seems to
me to be the source both of the strength and the weakness of the
Aristotelian system. Regarded in its moral aspects, it stands,
I believe, as a sane and valid protest against all systems of ethical
monism. Its metaphysical reinforcement of the vital, practical
distinction between what is and what ought to be, its insistence

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 178 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW [VOL. XVI.

upon imperfection as a real condition of affa

hallucination, contrast it with many systems of the present day
in the same terms in which Aristotle contrasted Anaxagoras with
the other Pre-Socratics. Theory may dream, if it likes, that
somewhere and somehow real and ideal, good and evil, black
and white, are one and identical, but practice must always act as
if they were two. And there is a strong presumption inherent
in the nature of thought against the validity of theories which
cannot be acted upon, nay, which, if they were valid, would
invalidate action. In this matter, at least, Aristotle is the expo-
nent of common sense, and of what we call real life. He preaches
what we practice. The pure-mindedness of his God rebukes the
double entendre of the absolute mind. His perfection, like the
perfection we worship, is the absence, not the sum of finite
imperfections; not the fictitious justification of what is, but the
concrete embodiment of what ought to be. We may perhaps
challenge the content of that ideal as too abstract and cold; but
we may doubt whether it be any more cheerless than that which
makes the peace of God to consist in a victorious battle of him-
self, by himself, with himself.
Moreover, if our ear be only alert to catch what I conceive
Aristotle really means by this apotheosis of the contemplative
life, we shall perhaps be willing to withdraw our challenge alto-
gether. There is nothing really pedantic, I believe, as might at
first appear, in this exaltation of the operation of thought above
the other functions of our nature. It is not the narrow view of
the recluse magnifying his own sedentary interest and belittling
all others, but rather a clear and sympathetic insight into the
purpose and perfection of all rational life. Aristotle is not saying
that man should be only a thinking being, but simply that of all the
activities of our nature thought best exemplifies in its inner rela-
tions what should and must be the organization of our whble life, so
far as it is a life, the 8ear7wrm of a rational and moral being. And
it is principally, I believe, because the activity of thought reveals
most clearly this ideal constitution of all noble life (though doubt-
less his insight was cheered and warmed by an enthusiasm for
the high serenity of philosophic contemplation) that Aristotle
makes of it the very essence of godhead.

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No. 2.] GOD IN ARISTOTLE'S METAPHYSICS. 179

I mean that for Aristotle a life of moral and rational value

must be a life of activity devoted to fine purposes. It must, as
it were, make of itself a vehicle or medium for the manifestation
of splendid and noble things. As thought should aim merely to
be its own object, so such a life in proportion as it fulfils its
function will be a more transparent medium of expression and
less discernible from what it conveys and represents. Could its
activities completely clarify themselves of all that was irrelevant
to its purpose, they and it would mean nothing but the living
presence in the world of the ideal things for which it stood. All
self-consciousness and extraneous experience and inappropriate
operation would have been sloughed off as functions in excess.
We, freed from all ' selfishness,' should have become wholly our
high callings. Thus the isolated moments of self-forgetfulness
in meditation and contemplation which we now and then enjoy,
might truly be said to have forecast the form of a whole life which
in all its activities should signify merely the actual existence of
the noble purposes to which wve had devoted ourselves.
So much for the ethical aspects of Aristotle's dualism. But
its pertinence to modern thought is not confined to them. From
the point of view of psychology, we may also ask whether the
complete isolation of the divine mind from all knowledge, cer-
tainly from all knowledge of the phenomenal world, and probably
from that of the logical universe, be not, in spite of its difficulties,
a valid criticism of the 'awful mystery' which characterizes the
digestion of experience by the Absolute, or, indeed, of any attri-
bution of sense-perception to a being 'without body, passions, or
parts.' The analogies of experience certainly do not warrant the
assumption of sensible experience apart from the existence of
sense-organs; and this, whether we be materialists or idealists.
In the one case, we say quite frankly that sense is conditioned by
the existence of a physical body; in the other, that it is always
found connected with that set of experiences which we call a body.
Nay, Aristotle's apparent denial to God of all knowlege save of
himself, is in one sense logical enough. For all forms except the
divine form are forms of sensible particulars. Psychologically
speaking, they are not pure thought, but are accompanied by

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 I80 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW [VOL. XVI.

imagery. Apart from the particulars which they cover and the
imagery which gives them content, they are forms of nothing and
are void. Their relevance, then, is drawn from a kind of experi-
ence which in its turn is relevant only to a substratum, material
in both our own and Aristotle's sense of the word. Hence they
cannot be appropriate objects of a divine or of any disembodied
and pure intelligence.
But although this dualism may be a fair criticism from the
point of view of morals and psychology of much of the thought
of to-day, it yet involves grave difficulties in other directions.
We may doubt, indeed, whether the metaphysical separation of
the finite and the Absolute involves any graver difficulty than do
our modern attempts at metaphysical derivation of finite from
absolute, imperfect from perfect, or even sensible phenomenon
from atom; but the separation is still indefensible. Subjectively,
it sunders a real unity of experience; objectively, it attributes
reality to abstractions, even if it does not try to make appearance
of reality. For the purpose of our criticism, it is much the same
whether we put the cart before the horse like the absolutists, or
unyoke them altogether like Aristotle. To the latter, one may
reply that what is practically is also metaphysically one; to the
former, that what is practically is also metaphysically real. God
and the world are one, indeed, but it is the world which is
tie one. The finite, the imperfect, the particular, is the real thing.
The Absolute, the point of view sub specie aternilatis, the Aris-
totelian God, are universals, ideal abstractions from the particular
objects which compose reality. God, as Aristotle describes him,
is merely an abstract, general description of the nature and ideal
of the human reason; but it is the finite reasons on which the
description is based, which are the real things. Pure form, in a
word, is no less an empty logical concept than pure matter, which
Aristotle recognized as such.
That Aristotle insisted on the concrete self-existence of pure
form in the divine being is perhaps due to his identification of
form and matter with actuality and potentiality respectively, com-
bined with considerations of physics and astronomy involved in
his doctrine of the priority of the actual. The cogency of this

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No. 2.] GOD IN ARISTOTLE'S METAPHYSICS. i8i

argument I do not deny. A thing, indeed, can only be ex-

plained out of its possibilities in retrospect.' We must have the
thing before we can derive it. We derive, for example, the solar
system from the nebular only by assuming the existence of a
number of conditions or laws, which the system as it is to-day,
or rather the whole history of the system, has revealed to us.
The nebula explains the world, simply because this is the world
which is proved defacto to be the actualization of its possibilities.
Prospectively, too, the ideal must already be given, in part at least,
before it is realized. Form is prior to its embodiment. But, on
the other hand, form is modified, nay, made by its embodiment;
the ideal is generated out of the real. Form, both so far as it is
realized and so far as it is idealized, has no other point d'appui
than the particular object whose real or ideal form it is. And for
the ideal to be realized, it is necessary only that it should be an
ideal, not that it should have an extraneous hypostasis. The
ideal like the universal, we may say, exists only in and for the
reals whose ideal it is. It turns from the expression of an unful-
filled interest into a fulfilled fact only when it is made a fact in
and by the real whose interest it expresses. The universe is just
as good, just as rational, just as complete as its members make
it. This would seem to be implied in the very nature of the
good and rational. Both are social in their genesis and refer-
ence, the expression of an interest to find common ground for
the building up of a common weal. The finding of that common
ground, the full realization of that common weal, necessitates in
the very nature of the case a discovery and a realization common
to the finite individuals whose interests and aspirations are in-
volved. A perfection which is social cannot be realized in any-
thing short of society; a perfection which is ours, in or by any-
thing but ourselves.
We may say, then, of the Aristotelian deity, in his role of sov-
ereign good, as of any other perfect being that arrogates to itself
in that capacity a self-existence transcending mundane realization
of itself, that it is a myth. Its separate hypostasis is simply a
fond anticipation in a metaphysical fairyland of an ideal begotten
by the human will and conceived by the human imagination and
to be born, if ever it shall be, in a world of human experience.

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 182 TIE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [VOL. XVI.

Moreover, supposing that we admitted the Aristotelian con-

tention that the highest good, the goal of the world movement,
contains within itself the conditions of its own existence, and is
from all eternity embodied in a self-subsistent life, we might well
question whether such an independence of the end of the process
seeking it did not invalidate the Aristotelian teleology. As the
case stands, the attempt to identify the efficient with the final
cause appears to be unsuccessful. God may be the object of the
world's desire, but the desire, the appetition, the impulse to seek
Him which is the real motive power of cosmic movement, it
would seem impossible to dissociate from matter. This failure
to reduce efficient to final causation is due, I think, to a defective
psychology. In interpreting the movement of the world by the
analogy of causation, Aristotle did not fully grasp the nature of
the analogy of which he made use. He failed to see that the
object of desire is nothing extraneous to and independent of the
desire, but is simply its own self-fulfilment. It is no transcendent
summum bonum, but the mere possession of unrealized capac-
ties which incites the will; the non-existence, one might say,
rather than the existence of perfection. The will, in a word, is
precisely that which Aristotle considered impossible, a self-actual-
izing potentiality. The correct understanding and application of
the analogy, then, should have led Aristotle to deny rather than
to assert the independent self-existence of the sovereign good.
It should have been' the absence rather than the presence of per-
fection which moved the world; not the fact that perfection
existed, but the fact that the world was not perfect, and that per-
fection could not exist till the world became perfect.
But admitting all these faults in the Aristotelian thought,-
faults, indeed, which make mythology of its metaphysics, -its
' mythos ' is yet that of the goddess of truth. Though we may
recognize that it is only the life of reason in the larger sense
which can be the true sovereign good, and that this life can have
no existence apart from finite individuals, either so far as they
conceive it ideally, or so far as they actually embody it, -in
fine, that the Aristotelian God is a pure ideal rising out of and
reacting upon a world of finite beings, where alone, if at all, it

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NO. 2.] GOD IN ARISTOTLE'S METAPHYSICS. 183

can find concrete existence, the system is nevertheless an accurate

description of the structure and meaning of experience. For the
nature of the experience which constitutes the universe for any
one finite center is, in truth, a movement from possible to actual,
from unrealized to realized capacities, from the chaos of mere
sensation and apperception to the cosmos of a rationalized and
ordered world, from a partial and distracted to a more complete
and self-forgetful identification with the good, - a movement
which might not inaptly be described as a striving of conscious-
ness to think itself in rational form. And of this there can be at
least no finer allegory than Aristotle's vision of the world as the
result of the yearning of imperfect and unrealized matter after the
pax, ordo, et tranquillitas of the perfect life of God.
B. A. G. FULLER.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY.

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