as absolute end, God includes all lower ends. And as the
end of each thing is the completed perfection of the thing,
so, as absolute end, God is absolute perfection. Lastly, as
efficient cause, God is the ultimate cause of all motion and
becoming. He is the first mover. As such, He is Himself
unmoved. That the first mover should be itself unmoved
is a necessary consequence of Aristotle’s conception of it
as end and form. For motion is the transition of a thing
towards its end. The absolute end can have no end beyond
it, and therefore cannot be moved. Likewise motion is the
passage of matter into form. Absolute form cannot pass
into any higher form, and is therefore unmoved. But the
argument which Aristotle himself more frequently uses to
establish the immovability of the first mover is that, unless
we so conceive it, no cause of motion appears. The moving
object is moved perhaps by another moving object. The
motion of the latter demands a further cause. If this further
cause is itself moving, we must again ask for the cause of
its motion. If this process goes on for ever, then motion is
unexplained, and no real cause of it has been shown. The
real and ultimate cause must therefore be unmoved.
This last argument sounds as if Aristotle is now thinking in
terms 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 soad
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 abso-
lute 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.