roblem, though not its solution, he
took from his predecessors. The problem of becoming had tortured Greek
thought from the earliest ages. The philosophy of Heracleitus, in
which it was most prominent, had failed to solve it. Heracleitus and
his successors racked their brains to discover how becoming could be
possible. But even if they had solved this minor problem, the greater
question still remained in the background, what does this becoming
mean? Becoming for them was only meaningless change. It was not
development. The world-process was an endless stream of futile and
purposeless events, "a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing." Aristotle not merely asked himself how becoming
is possible. He showed that becoming has a meaning, that it signifies
something, that the world-process is a rationally ordered development
towards a rational end.

But, though Aristotle's philosophy is the highest presentation of the
truth in ancient times, it cannot be accepted as anything final and
faultless. Doubtless no philosophy can ever attain to finality. Let us
apply our {334} two-fold test. Does his principle explain the world,
and does it explain itself? First, does it explain the world? The
cause of Plato's failure here was the dualism in his system between
sense and thought, between matter and the Ideas. It was impossible to
derive the world from the Ideas, because they were absolutely
separated from the world. The gulf was so great that it could never be
bridged. Matter and Idea lay apart, and could never be brought
together. Now Aristotle saw this dualism in Plato, and attempted to
surmount it. The universal and the particular, he said, do not thus
lie apart, in different worlds. The Idea is not a thing here, and
matter a thing there, so that these two incommensurables have to be
somehow mechanically and violently forced together to form a world.
Universal and particular, matter and form, are inseparable. The
connexion between them is not mechanical, but organic. The dualism of
Plato is thus admitted and refuted. But is it really surmounted? The
answer must be in the negative. It is not enough by a _tour de force_ to
bring matter and form together, to assert that they are inseparable,
while they remain all the time, in principle, separate entities. If
the Absolute is form, matter ought to be deduced from form, shown to
be merely a projection and manifestation of it. It must be shown that
form not o