come, while an important
place is made for experience, or science.

Aristotle, accepting the world of common-sense, tried to rationalize it;
that is, to realize it in himself. First among the Greeks he believed it
to be unique, uncreated, and eternal, and gave his reasons. Recognizing
that the phenomenal world exists in change, he investigated the
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