inary man's thought would lead him to
believe that, in that case, it is no longer necessary to assume a
first principle at all. But if time is a mere appearance, this whole
way of looking at things must be wrong. God is not related to the
world as cause to effect. It is not a relation of time at all. It is a
_logical_ relation. God is rather the logical premise, of which the
world is the conclusion, so that, God granted, the world follows
necessarily, just as, the premises granted, the conclusion follows.
This is the reason why, in discussing Plato, we said that it must be
possible to _deduce_ the world from his first principle. If the
Absolute were merely the cause of the world in time, it would not
explain the world, for, as I have so often pointed out, causes explain
nothing. But if the world be deducible from the Absolute, the world is
explained, a reason, not a cause, is given for it, just as the
premises constitute the reason for the conclusion. Now the conclusion
of a syllogism follows from the premises, that is, the premises come
first, the conclusion second. But the premise only comes first in
thought, not in time. It is a logical succession, not a
time-succession. Just in the same way, the Absolute, or in Aristotle's
language, the form, is logically first, but is not first in order of
time. And though it is the end, it is in thought the absolute
beginning, and is thus the foundation of the world, the first
principle from which the world flows. The objection may be, taken that
if the relation of the {283} Absolute to the world is not a
time-relation, then it can no more be the end than the beginning. This
objection is, as we shall see, a misunderstanding of Aristotle's
philosophy. Although things in time strive towards the end, yet the
absolute end is not in time at all, or, in other words, the end is
never reached. Its relation to the world as end is just as much a
logical, and not a time-relation, as its relation to the world as
beginning or absolute prius. As far as time is concerned, the universe
is without beginning or end.

As the world-process is a continual elevation of matter into higher
and higher forms, there results the conception that the universe
exhibits a continuous scale of being. That is higher in the scale in
which form predominates, that lower in which matter outweighs form. At
the bottom of the scale will be absolutely formless matter, at the
top, absolutely matterless form. Both these ext