edes some room as a principle of
degradation in the universe, is now admitted to good standing. _Matter_
or material is indispensable to being as its potentiality or that out of
which it is constituted. The ideal, on the other hand, loses its
exclusive title to the predicate of reality, and becomes the _form_, or
the determinate nature which exists only in its particular embodiments.
The being or _substance_ is the concrete individual, of which these are
the abstracted aspects. Aristotle's "form," like Plato's "idea," is a
teleological principle. The essential nature of the object is its
perfection. It is furthermore essential to the object that it should
strive after a higher perfection. With Aristotle, however, the reality
is not the consummation of the process, the highest perfection in and
for itself, but the very hierarchy of objects that ascends toward it.
The highest perfection, or God, is not itself coextensive with being,
but the final cause of being--that on account of which the whole
progression of events takes place. Reality is the development with all
of its ascending stages from the maximum of potentiality, or matter, to
the maximum of actuality, or God the pure form.

[Sidenote: The Aristotelian Philosophy as a Reconciliation of Platonism
and Spinozism.]

Sect. 163. To understand the virtue of this philosophy as a basis for
the reconciliation of different interests, we must recall the relation
between Plato and Spinoza. Their characteristic difference appears to
the best advantage in connection with mathematical truth. Both regarded
geometry as the best model for philosophical thinking, but for different
reasons. Spinoza prized geometry for its necessity, and proposed to
extend it. His philosophy is the attempt to formulate a geometry of
being, which shall set forth the inevitable certainties of the universe.
Plato, on the other hand, prized geometry rather for its definition of
types, for its knowledge of pure or perfect natures such as the circle
and triangle, which in immediate experience are only approximated. His
philosophy defines reality similarly as the absolute perfection.
Applied to nature Spinozism is mechanical, and looks for necessary laws,
while Platonism is teleological, and looks for adaptation and
significance. Aristotle's position is intermediate. With Plato he
affirms that the good is the ultimate principle. But this very principle
is conceived to govern a universe of substances, each