while yet remaining recognizably the same thing. For
example, it shows in itself a greater advance to richness and also a
decline, it uses other things to foster this advance, and it sends out
fresh things, like itself, but independent of itself: in short, it
grows, decays, feeds itself, and propagates its kind.[19]

As I understand Aristotle, for him there is not an entire and absolute
difference between ordinary matter and living things, and yet there is a
real difference, and one not to be explained away, for there is a new
manifestation of active energy. And if we consider life of more value
than mere motion, then we are right in saying there is a higher energy.
The quality of growth is a quality which could not be deduced from the
quality of warmth or from the quality of mere movement in space, and yet
all three qualities are alike in this, that they are all manifestations
of an energy which is somehow inherent in things, and not merely imposed
on them from without. The manifestations of life are started, in a
sense, by the different movements, 'mechanical', if you like to call
them so, in the rudimentary forms of matter, the elements meeting each
other in space. The process of life could not have begun without such
movements. But neither could it have begun if the elements, just as they
appear, had been all there was. There had to be latent, that is, the
possibility of a different and higher mode of action. This higher mode
of action Aristotle calls a higher Form, a higher Idea. And I think it
is true to him to say that he believes the lower Forms, the lower Ideas,
do their most perfect work when they bring about the conditions under
which the higher ones can operate. For when he speaks of that
concurrence of elements that conditions life he speaks of the 'warmth
and cold' as 'having mastered the matter'.[20]

In any case he conceives a whole series of higher and lower Forms, the
higher coming nearer and nearer to that full and glorious activity which
he conceives to be the life of God. Above the power of the thing to grow
as a plant grows appears the power of sensation as it is present in
animals, and above that again the power, first seen in man, of living
the life of thought, perceiving what is beautiful and true in the
'forms', the characters, of all the things around him, and with this
that further power of setting consciously before himself what he really
wants to be and to do, the power of moral action stri