showing what are the higher, and what the lower, animal
organisms. This he connects with the {298} methods of
propagation employed by different animals. Sex-generation
is the mark of a higher organism than parthenogenesis.
The scale of being proceeds from animals to man. The hu-
man organism, of course, contains the principles of all lower
organisms. Man nourishes himself, grows, propagates his
kind, moves about, and is endowed with sense-perception.
But he must have in addition his own special function,
which constitutes his advance beyond the animals. This
is reason. Reason is the essential, the proper end and ac-
tivity of man. His soul is nutritive, sensitive, and rational.
In man, therefore, the world-reason which could only ap-
pear in inorganic matter as gravitation and levitation, in
plants as nutrition, in animals as sensation, appears at last
in its own proper form, as what it essentially is, reason.
The world-reason, so long struggling towards the light, has
reached it, has become actual, has become existent, in man.
The world-process has attained its proximate end.
Within human consciousness there are lower and higher
grades, and Aristotle has taken great pains to trace these
from the bottom to the top. These stages of conscious-
ness are what are ordinarily called “faculties.” But Aristo-
tle notes that it is nonsense to talk, as Plato did, of the
“parts” of the soul. The soul, being a single indivisible be-
ing, has no parts. They are different aspects of the activity
of one and the same being; different stages of its develop-
ment. They can no more be separated than the convex and
concave aspects of a curve. The lowest faculty, if we must
use that word, is sense-perception. Now what we perceive
in a thing is its qualities. Perception tells us that a piece of
gold is {299} heavy, yellow,etc. The underlying substra-
tum which supports the qualities cannot be perceived. This
means that the matter is unknowable, the form knowable,
for the qualities are part of the form. Sense-perception,
therefore, takes place when the object stamps its form upon
the soul. This is important for what it implies rather than
what it states. It shows the thoroughly idealistic trend of
Aristotle’s thought. For if the form is what is knowable in
a thing, the more form there is, the more knowable it will
be. Absolute form, God, will be the absolutely knowable.
That the Absolute is what alone is completely knowable,
intelligible, and comprehensible, and the finite and mate-
rial comparatively unknowable, is a point of view essential
to idealism, and stands in marked contrast to the popu-
lar idea of rationalism that the Absolute is unknowable,
and matter knowable. For idealism, the Absolute is reason,
thought. What can be more thoroughly intelligible than
reason? What can thought understand, if not thought?
This, of course, is not stated by Aristotle. But it is implied
in his theory of sense-perception.Next in the scale above the senses comes the common
sense. This has nothing to do with what we understand
by that phrase in every-day language. It means the cen-
tral sensation-ganglion in which isolated sensations meet,
are combined, and form a unity of experience. We saw,
in considering Plato, that the simplest kind of knowledge,
such as, “this paper is white,” involves, not only isolated
sensations, but their comparison and contrast. Bare sen-
sations would not even make objects. For every object is