han
man, and so higher in the scale. They live an absolutely blessed and
perfect life. They are immortal and eternal, because they are the
supreme self-realization of the eternal reason. It is only upon this
earth that death and corruption occur, a circumstance which has no
doubt emphasized that view of Aristotle's philosophy which holds the
gap between man and the stars to be a real one. The heavenly bodies
are not composed of the four elements, but of a fifth, a quintessence,
which is called ether. Like all elements it must have its natural
motion. And as it is the finest and most perfect, its motion must be
perfect. And it must be an eternal motion, because the stars are
eternal beings. It cannot be motion in a straight line, because that
never comes to an end, and so is never perfect. Circular motion alone
is perfect. And it is eternal because its end and its beginning are
one. Hence the natural motion of ether is circular, and the stars move
in perfect circles.

Leaving the stars behind, we reach the summit of the long ladder from
matter to form. This is the absolute form, God. As formless matter is
not an existent thing, nor is matterless form. God, therefore, is not
in the {307} world of space and time at all. But it is one of the
curiosities of thought that Aristotle nevertheless gives him a place
outside the outermost sphere. What is outside the sphere is,
therefore, not space. All space and time are inside this globular
universe. Space is therefore finite. And God must be outside the
outermost sphere because he is the highest being, and the higher
always comes outside the lower.

We have now described the entire scale of evolution. Looking back upon
it, we can see its inner significance. The Absolute is reason,
matterless form. Everything in the world, therefore, is, in its
essence, reason. If we wish to know the essential nature even of this
clod of earth, the answer is that it is reason, although this view is
not consistently developed by Aristotle, since he allows that matter
is a separate principle which cannot be reduced to form. The whole
universal process of things is nothing but the struggle of reason to
express itself, to actualize itself, to become existent in the world.
This it definitely does, for the first time proximately in man, and
completely in the stars. It can only express itself in lower beings as
sensation (animals), as nutrition (plants), or as gravitation and its
opposite (inorganic m