ctly so-called.

Throughout this series, in every higher stage the lower is present as a
kind of basis. In the man who thinks there is active not only the power
of thought, but also the power of sensation, the faculty of growth, and
the physical properties of the body. It would seem that Aristotle has
only to take one step, and he would be a thoroughgoing evolutionist. He
has only to say that the different stages are successive in time, the
lower regularly preceding the higher. But this step he hesitates to
take.

He often comes very near it. He speaks of nature passing gradually from
inanimate things through living things to living animals. He speaks of
what is first in itself, first inherently, 'prior' in the logical sense
because it is the goal and the completion of the thing, as appearing
later in time. For instance, he believes that man can only find his real
happiness and develop his real nature in the State, but the State
appears later in time than the primitive associations of the household
and the family.[21] What came earlier in history were barbarous
communities such as those of the Cyclopes, where 'each man laid down the
law for his wife and children and obeyed no other law'.

But Aristotle does not go on from this belief to the belief in a
universal upward process throughout all history. The developed State, it
is true, may always have been preceded by a lower form, but that lower
form may itself have been preceded by a higher.

Aristotle, in short, is haunted, like Plato, by the idea of cycles,
alternations, decline and progress, progress and decline. He feels this
both in the life of States and in the whole life of the world. He speaks
of the same discoveries being made over and over again, an infinite
number of times, in the history of civilization. And his words recall
the sad passage in Plato's _Laws_ (676) referring to the numberless
nations and states, ten thousand times ten thousand, that had risen and
fallen all over the world, passing from worse to better and from better
to worse. Similarly Aristotle will speak of degraded animal forms, and
sometimes write as though the animal world could sink back into the
vegetable altogether.

Admitting, however, something like progress within the different cycles,
we must ask a little more about the kind of progress which Aristotle
would have desired. (I take Aristotle again as a typical Greek.) Man at
his best, he clearly holds, in trying to realize his