principle and method of this. Change he conceives as a transition from
potentiality to actuality, and as always due to something actualized,
communicating its form to something potential. Looking at the "world" as
a whole, and picturing it as limited, globular, and constructed like an
onion, with the earth in the centre, and round about it nine concentric
spheres carrying the planets and stars, he concludes that there must be
at one end something purely actual and therefore unchanging,--that is,
pure form or energy; and at the other, something purely potential and
therefore changing,--that is, pure matter or latency. The pure actuality
is at the circumference, pure matter at the centre. Matter, however,
never exists without some form. Thus, nature is an eternal circular
process between the actual and the potential. The supreme Intelligence,
God, being pure energy, changelessly thinks himself, and through the
love inspired by his perfection moves the outmost sphere; which would
move all the rest were it not for inferior intelligences, fifty-six in
number, who, by giving them different directions, diversify the divine
action and produce the variety of the world. The celestial world is
composed of eternal matter, or aether, whose only change is circular
motion; the sublunary world is composed of changing matter, in four
different but mutually transmutable forms--fire, air, water,
earth--movable in two opposite directions, in straight lines, under the
ever-varying influence of the celestial spheres.
Thus the world is an organism, making no progress as a whole, but
continually changing in its various parts. In it all real things are
individuals, not universals, as Plato thought. And forms pass from
individual to individual only. Peleus, not humanity, is the parent of
Achilles; the learned man only can teach the ignorant. In the
world-process there are several distinct stages, to each of which
Aristotle devotes a special work, or series of works. Beginning with the
"four elements" and their changes, he works up through the mineral,
vegetable, and animal worlds, to man, and thence through the spheral
intelligences to the supreme, divine intelligence, on which the Whole
depends. Man stands on the dividing line between the temporal and the
eternal; belonging with his animal part to the former, with his
intelligence (which "enters from without") to the latter. He is an
intelligence, of the same nature as the sphere-movers, but individuated
by mutable matter in the form of a body, matter being in all cases the
principle of individuation. As intelligence, he becomes free; takes the
guidance of his life into his own hand; and, first through ethics,
politics, and aesthetics, the forms of his sensible or practical
activity, and second through logic, science, and philosophy, the forms
of his intellectual activity, he rises to divine heights and "plays the
immortal." His supreme activity is contemplation. This, the eternal
energy of God, is possible for man only at rare intervals.
Aristotle, by placing his eternal forms in sensible things as their
meaning, made science possible and necessary. Not only is he the father
of scientific method, inductive and deductive, but his actual
contributions to science place him in the front rank of scientists. His
Zooelogy, Psychology, Logic, Metaphysics, Ethics, Politics, and
Aesthetics, are still highly esteemed and extensively studied. At the
same time, by failing to overcome the dualism and supernaturalism of
Plato, by adopting the popular notions about spheres and sphere-movers,
by separating intelligence from sense, by conceiving matter as
independent and the principle of individuation, and by making science
relate only to the universal, he paved the way for astrology, alchemy,
magic, and all the forms of superstition, retarding the advance of
several sciences, as for example astronomy and chemistry, for many