rsonality is that the language Aristotle uses
implies it. The very word God, used instead of the Absolute, or form,
conveys the idea of personality. And when he goes on to speak of God
living in eternal blessedness, these words, if taken literally, can
mean nothing except that God is a conscious person. If we say that
this language is merely figurative, it may be replied that Aristotle
on principle objects to figurative language, that he frequently
censures Plato for using it, that what he demands and sets out to
supply is exact, literal, scientific terminology, and that he is not
likely to have broken his own canons of philosophic expression by
using merely poetical phrases.

To see the other side of the case, we must first ask what personality
means. Now without entering into an intricate discussion of this most
elusive idea, we may answer that personality at any rate implies an
_individual_ and _existent_ consciousness. But, in the first place, God is
absolute form, and form is the universal. What is universal, with no
particular in it, cannot be an individual. {287} God, therefore,
cannot be individual. Secondly, form without matter cannot exist. And
as God is form without matter, he cannot be called existent, though he
is absolutely real. God, therefore, is neither existent nor
individual. And this means that he is not a person. To degrade the
real to the level of the existent, to convert the universal into the
individual, is exactly the fault for which Aristotle blames Plato. It
is exactly the fault which it was the whole object of his philosophy
to remedy. If he thought that God is a person, he committed the same
fault himself in an aggravated form.

We have, then, two hypotheses, both of which involve that Aristotle
was guilty of some inconsistency. If God is not a person, then
Aristotle's language is figurative, and his use of such language is
inconsistent with his rooted objection to its use. This, however, is,
after all, merely an inconsistency of language, and not of thought. It
does not mean that Aristotle really contradicted himself. It merely
means that, though he set himself to express his philosophy in
technical scientific terms, and to exclude figurative language, yet he
found himself compelled in a few passages to make use of it. There are
some metaphysical ideas so abstract, so abstruse, that it is almost
impossible to express them at all without the use of figures of
speech. Language was made by c