rms 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 so _ad 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 pe