ut is constituted at every moment by them. This Life is at
the same time the condition on which alone each and every one of the
functions constituting it can be performed. Thus {186} life in an
organism is at once the end and the middle and the beginning; it is the
cause final, the cause formal, the cause efficient. Life then is an
_Entelechy_, as Aristotle calls it, by which he means the realisation
in unity of the total activities exhibited in the members of the living
organism.

In such an existence every part is at once a potentiality and an
actuality, and so also is the whole. We can begin anywhere and travel
out from that point to the whole; we can take the whole and find in it
all the parts.

{187}

CHAPTER XIX

ARISTOTLE (_continued_)

_Realisation and reminiscence--The crux of philosophy--Reason in
education--The chief good--Origin of communities_

If we look closely at this conception of Aristotle's we shall see that
it has a nearer relation to the Platonic doctrine of Ideas, and even to
the doctrine of Reminiscence, than perhaps even Aristotle himself
realised. The fundamental conception of Plato, it will be remembered,
is that of an eternally existing 'thought of God,' in manifold forms or
'ideas,' which come into the consciousness of men in connection with or
on occasion of sensations, which are therefore in our experience later
than the sensations, but which we nevertheless by reason recognise as
necessarily prior to the sensations, inasmuch as it is through these
ideas alone that the sensations are knowable or namable at all. Thus
the final end for man is by contemplation and 'daily dying to the world
of sense,' to come at last into the full inheritance in conscious
knowledge of that 'thought of God' which was latent from the first in
his soul, and of which in its fulness God Himself is eternally and
necessarily possessed.

{188}

[311]

This is really Aristotle's idea, only Plato expresses it rather under a
psychological, Aristotle under a vital, formula. God, Aristotle says,
is eternally and necessarily Entelechy, absolute realisation. _To us_,
that which is first _in time_ (the individual perception) is not first
in _essence_, or absolutely. What is first in essence or absolutely,
is the universal, that is, the form or idea, the datum of reason. And
this distinction between time and the absolute, between our individual
experience and the essential or ultimate reality, run