objects that ascends toward it. The highest perfection, or God, is not itself coextensive with being, but the final cause of being that on account of which the whole progression of events takes place. Reality is the development with all of its ascending stages from the maximum of potentiality, or matter, to the maximum of actuality, or God the pure form.

lian Philos

ophy as a Reconcilia

nism and

§ 163. To understand the virtue of this philosophy as a basis for the reconciliation of different The Aristote interests, we must recall the relation between Plato and Spinoza. Their tion of Plato- characteristic difference appears to the Spinozism. best advantage in connection with mathematical truth. Both regarded geometry as the best model for philosophical thinking, but for different reasons. Spinoza prized geometry for its necessity, and proposed to extend it. His philosophy is the attempt to formulate a geometry of being, which shall set forth the inevitable certainties of the universe. Plato, on the other hand, prized geometry rather for its definition of types, for its knowledge of pure or perfect natures such as the circle and triangle, which in immediate experience are only approximated. His philosophy defines reality similarly as the absolute

perfection. Applied to nature Spinozism is me chanical, and looks for necessary laws, whi Platonism is teleological, and looks for adaptati: and significance. Aristotle's position is inter mediate. With Plato he affirms that the good the ultimate principle. But this very principle is conceived to govern a universe of substances, eaci of which maintains its own proper being, and all of which are reciprocally determined in their changes. Final causes dominate nature, but work through efficient causes. Reality is not pure perfection, as in Platonism, nor the indifferent necessity, as in Spinozism, but the system of beings necessary to the complete progression toward the highest perfection. The Aristotelian philosophy promises, then, to overcome both the hard realism of Parmenides and Spinoza, and also the supernaturalism of Plato.

§ 164. But it promises, furthermore, to remedy the defect common to these two doctrines, the very Leibniz's Ap- besetting problem of this whole type of the Conception philosophy. That problem, as has been ment to the seen, is to provide for the imperfect

plication of

of Develop

Problem of

Imperfection. within the perfect, for the temporal incidents of nature and history within the eternal being. Many absolutist philosophers have de

clared the explanation of this realm to be impossible, and have contented themselves with calling it the realm of opinion or appearance. And this realm of opinion or appearance has been used as a proof of the absolute. Zeno, the pupil of Parmenides, was the first to elaborate what have since come to be known as the paradoxes of the empirical world. Most of these paradoxes turn upon the infinite extension and divisibility of space and time. Zeno was especially interested in the difficulty of conceiving motion, which involves both space and time, and thought himself to have demonstrated its absurdity and impossibility.10 His argument is thus the complement of Parmenides's argument for the indivisible and unchanging substance. Now the method which Zeno here adopts may be extended to cover the whole realm of nature and history. We should then be dialectically driven from this realm to take refuge in absolute being. But the empirical world is not destroyed by disparagement, and cannot long lack champions even among the absolutists themselves. The reconciliation of nature and history with the absolute being became the special interest of Leibniz, the great modern Aristotelian. As a scientist and

10 See Burnet: Op. cit., pp. 322-333.

man of affairs, he was profoundly dissatisfied wi Spinoza's resolution of nature, the human in vidual, and the human society into the univer being. He became an advocate of individual while retaining the general aim and method rationalism.

Like Aristotle, Leibniz attributes reality tor dividual substances, which he calls "monads" and like Aristotle he conceives these monads t compose an ascending order, with God, the mons of monads, as its dominating goal.

"Furthermore, every substance is like an entire work and like a mirror of God, or indeed of the whole work which it portrays, each one in its own fashion; almost as the same city is variously represented according to the various situations of him who is regarding it. Thus the universe is multiplied in some sort as many times as there are substances, and the glory of God is multiplied in the same way by as many wholly different representations of his works." 11

The very "glory of God," then, requires the innumerable finite individuals with all their char acteristic imperfections, that the universe may lack no possible shade or quality of perspective.

§ 165. But the besetting problem is in fact not 11 Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics. Translation by Montgomery, p. 15.

In so far as the monads are spiritual this doctrine tends to be subjectivistic. Cf. Chap. IX.

f Imperfecion Remains Unsolved.

olved, and is one of the chief incentives to that ther philosophy of absolutism which defines an he Problem absolute spirit or mind. Both Aristotle and Leibniz undertake to make the perfection which determines the order of the hierarchy of substances, at the same time the responsible author of the whole hierarchy. In this case the dilemma is plain. If the divine form or the divine monad be other than the stages that lead up to it, these latter cannot be essential to it, for God is by definition absolutely self-sufficient. If, on the other hand, God is identical with the development in its entirety, then two quite incommensurable standards of perfection determine the supremacy of the divine nature, that of the whole and that of the highest parts of the whole. The union of these two and the definition of a perfection which may be at once the development and its goal, is the task of absolute idealism.

§ 166. Of the two fundamental questions of epistemology, absolute realism answers the one explicitly, the other implicitly. As reEpistemology. spects the source of the most valid Rationalism. knowledge, Parmenides, Plato, Aris

Absolute

Realism in

totle, Spinoza are all agreed: true knowledge is