tural motion; its end is conceived
merely spatially, and its activity is to move towards its "proper
place," and, having thus reached its end, it rests. The natural {295}
movement of fire is up. We may call this a principle of levitation, as
opposed to gravitation. Aristotle has been the subject of cheap
criticism on account of his frequent use of the words "natural" and
"unnatural." [Footnote 15] It is said that he was satisfied to explain
the operations of nature by simply labelling them "natural." If you
ask a quite uneducated person why heavy bodies fall, he may quite
possibly reply, "Oh! _naturally_ they fall." This simply means that
the man has never thought about the matter at all, and thinks whatever
is absolutely familiar to him is "natural" and needs no explanation.
It is like the feminine argument that a thing is so, "because it is."
It is assumed that Aristotle was guilty of a like futility. This is
not the case. His use of the word "natural" does not indicate lack of
thought. There is a thought, an idea, here. No doubt he was quite
wrong in many of his facts. Thus there is no such principle as
levitation in the universe. But there is a principle of gravitation,
and when he explains this by saying it is "natural" for earth to move
downwards, he means, not that the fact is familiar, but that the
principle of form, or the world-reason, can only exhibit itself here
so dimly as to give rise to a comparatively aimless and purposeless
movement in a straight line. Not absolutely purposeless, however,
because nothing in the world is such, and the purpose here is simply
the movement of matter towards its end. This may or may not be a true
explanation of gravity. But has anybody since ever explained it
better?

[Footnote 15: See, _e.g._ Sir Alexander Grant's _Aristotle_ in the
Ancient Classics for English Readers Series (Blackwood), pages
119-121.]

This gives us, too, the clue to the distinction between {296} the
inorganic and the organic. If inorganic matter is what has its end
outside itself, organic matter will be what has its end within itself.
This is the essential character of an organism, that its end is
internal to it. It is an inward self-developing principle. Its
function, therefore, can only be the actualisation, the
self-realization of this inward end. Whereas, therefore, inorganic
matter has no activity except spatial movement, organic matter has for
its activity growth, and this growth is not the mer