potentiality into actuality, of matter into form.
Since matter is in itself nothing, a bare unrealised capacity,
while form is actuality, the completed and perfected being,
it follows that form is something higher than matter. But
matter is what becomes form. In order of time, therefore,
matter is earlier, form later. But in order of thought, and
in reality, it is otherwise. For when we say that matter
is the potentiality of what it is to become, this implies
that what it is to become is already present in it ideally
and potentially, though not actually. The end, therefore, is
already present in the beginning. The oak is in the acorn,
ideally, otherwise the oak could never come out of it. And
since all becoming is towards the end, and would not take
place but for the end, the end is the operative principle
and true cause of becoming. Motion is produced not by
a mechanical propulsive force, pushing from behind, so to
speak, but by an ideal attractive force, drawing the thing
towards its end, as a piece of iron is drawn to the magnet.
It is the end itself which exerts this force. And, therefore,
the end must be present at the beginning, for if it were not
present it could exert no force. Nay, more. It is not only
present in the beginning, it is anterior to it. For the end is
the cause of the motion, and the cause is logically prior to
its consequence. The end, or the principle of form, is thus
the absolute first in thought and reality, though it may be
the last in time. If, then, {281} we ask what, for Aristotle,
is that ultimate reality, that first principle, from which the
entire universe flows, the answer is, the end, the principle
of form. And as form is the universal, the Idea, we see that
his fundamental thesis is the same as Plato’s. It is the one
thesis of all idealism, namely, that thought, the universal,
reason, is the absolute being, the foundation of the world.
Where he differs from Plato is in denying that form has any
existence apart from the matter in which it exhibits itself.Now all this may strike the unsophisticated as very strange.
That the absolute being whence the universe flows should
be described as that which lies at the end of the develop-
ment of the universe, and that philosophy should proceed
to justify this by asserting that the end is really prior to the
beginning, this is so far removed from the common man’s
mode of thought, that it may appear mere paradox. It is,
however, neither strange nor paradoxical. It is essentially
sound and true, and it seems strange to the ordinary man
only because it penetrates so much deeper into things than
he can. This thought is, in fact, essential to a developed
idealism, and till it is grasped no advance can be made in
philosophy. Whether it is understood is, indeed, a good
test of whether a man has any talent for philosophy or not.
The fact is that all philosophies of this sort regard time as
unreal, as an appearance. This being so, the relation of the
absolute being, or God, to the world cannot be a relation
of time at all. The common man’s idea is that, if there is
a first principle or God at all, He must have existed before
the world began, and then, somehow, perhaps billions of
years ago, something happened as a {282} result of which
the world came into being. The Absolute is thus conceived
as the cause, the world as the effect, and the cause always
precedes its effect in time. Or if, on the other hand, we
think that the world never had a beginning, the ordinary
man’s thought would lead him to believe that, in that case,