Aristotle, accordingly, was not perplexed by phenomena of change, and did not consider process incompatible with reality. And so he distinguished in all things matter from form, the rela tively raw stuff from the relatively finished product. He applied the distinction all round, not to material things only. The dis tinction naturally cannot be quite the same in all cases, and it is relative in more senses than one. The "form" of a statue is a "shape" as distinguished from the marble which constitutes its "matter"; the "form" of a human character is a certain "organ isation" of the instincts and impulses which constitute the raw material before they have been "licked into shape"; the "form" of a plant, an animal, a man consists of a certain "function"— nutrition, sensibility, and reason respectively—which distinguishes it from what is below it in the scale of existence; and so on. Again, nothing is entirely without "form." Even the block of marble has some shape before it becomes a statue; impulses and instincts have some sort of co-ordination at every stage in the process of character formation ; and the things which in virtue of their several highest functions are plants, or animals, or men would still be something even in the absence of those functions, only they would be different ; that is, they would have different forms.
In the last resort, even the crudest kind of matter, the so-called four elements (earth, water, air, fire), recognized by Greek phil osophers since the time of Empedocles (?483-43o), were not re garded by Aristotle as pure formless matter, but as primal matter which had assumed different "forms" in consequence of the differ ent combinations of their ultimate qualities (hot, cold, dry, moist). Pure, formless matter was simply a limiting conception. The whole state of any thing still capable of further development was regarded as "matter" in relation to the process, or function, etc., which would complete it, and which was called its "form"; yet within that so-called "matter" one would as naturally distinguish a "form" or something which distinguished it from a still less developed state or condition (actual or imaginary). In most cases, however, this series of relative distinctions has its limits. A.
material object, e.g., cannot have less "form" than the four ele ments have. But there is usually also a limit to the highest "form" which certain kinds of matter can assume. A block of marble may become a statue or an image of some kind; it can not become a plant, or an animal, etc. An acorn may become a sapling, and this sapling may grow into an oak, but it cannot grow into anything else. Still, though Aristotle believed in the fixity of species, he could compare the great and wonderful variety of things, and arrange them imaginatively in a kind of ascending series or "scale of nature." Such a scale beginning with the lowest types of matter, with their suggestion of mere "formless" matter as an imaginary limit ing case, and ascending through the various forms of life the "matter" of which becomes richer and richer in "forms" (when regarded from below) naturally suggested an upper limiting case; namely, some being who has realized the highest perfection or completeness, who cannot therefore be regarded as "matter" for further development, but only as "form." This highest being Aristotle identified with God. Like Plato's "Good," Aristotle's God was an "Idea" in Plato's sense (the only Platonic idea that Aristotle accepted), and the "end" or final cause of the universe. Aristotle conceived of all things as being somehow drawn towards God, and as going through the various processes of change and motion in consequence of this attraction. In this way, he con ceived, God may, by His mere presence, cause all the changes and movements of things without Himself either moving or changing —He is the Unmoved Mover of the universe. For Aristotle, how ever, God is not the Creator of the universe. For the universe is eternal. Matter is eternal ; and all the Forms are eternal, because there is no break in the succession of each Form's individual em bodiments in matter. The effect of God's presence in the universe is that as the object of the world's desire He induces the already existing "matter" to develop its potentialities by assuming higher `forms." (See ARISTOTLE; LOGIC, HISTORY OF; ETHICS, HISTORY OF; KNOWLEDGE, THEORY OF ; PSYCHOLOGY, HISTORY OF.)