ommon men for common purposes, and this
fact often forces the philosopher to use terms which he knows only
figure forth his meaning without accurately expressing it. Perhaps
every philosophy in the world finds itself sometimes under this
necessity, and, if Aristotle did so, and was thereby technically
inconsistent with himself, it is no wonder, and involves no serious
blame upon him.

{288}

But the other hypothesis, that God is a person, means that Aristotle
committed a contradiction, not merely in words, but in thought, and
not merely as regards some unimportant detail, but as regards the
central thesis of his system. It means that he stultified himself by
making his conception of God absolutely contradict the essentials of
his system. For what is the whole of Aristotle's philosophy, put in a
nutshell? It is that the Absolute is the universal, but that the
universal does not exist apart from the particular. Plato supplied the
thought of the first clause of the sentence. Aristotle added the last
clause, and it is the essential of his philosophy. To assert that God,
the absolute form, exists as an individual, is flatly to contradict
this. It is not likely that Aristotle should have contradicted himself
in so vital a matter, and in a manner which simply means that his
system falls to the ground like a house of cards.

My conclusion, then, is that it was not Aristotle's intention that
what he calls God should be regarded as a person. God is thought, but
not subjective thought. He is not thought existent in a mind, but
objective thought, real on its own account, apart from any mind which
thinks it, like Plato's Ideas. But Plato's mistake was to suppose that
because thought is real and objective, it must exist. Aristotle avoids
this error. The absolute thought is the absolutely real. But it does
not exist. With the concept of God the metaphysics of Aristotle
closes.

4. Physics, or the Philosophy of Nature.

The existent universe is a scale of being lying between the two
extremes of formless matter and matterless form. But this must not be
merely asserted, as a general {289} principle. It must be carried out
in detail. The passage of matter into form must be shown in its
various stages in the world of nature. To do this is the object of
Aristotle's Physics, or philosophy of nature.

If nature is to be understood, we must keep in mind certain general
points of view. In the first place, since form includes end, th