xii ACTIVITY AND SUBSTANCE 209 



Aristotle has packed all that was most distinctive, most 

 original, most fundamental, and most profound in his 

 philosophy. Now in philosophy all real originality is 

 constructive for you cannot pull down without a standing 

 ground whence to effect the operation and all real con- 

 structiveness is also critical, for, as the earliest Pharaohs 

 already knew, the most effective and unanswerable way 

 of abolishing your rival s constructions is to use them up 

 in your own. Hence it is that Aristotle s conception of 

 Energeia constitutes both his really effective criticism of 

 Plato, a criticism whose massive weight is far more 

 crushing than the querulous and dialectical quibbling 

 which he so often seems to substitute for serious apprecia 

 tion of his master s work, and also the really decisive step 

 in his advance beyond Plato. But the step was such a 

 great one, and advances into regions so remote from our 

 habitual modes of thinking, that not even the lapse of 

 twenty centuries has rendered it easy to follow in his 

 footsteps. 



II 



It follows from his rehabilitation of the Process-view 

 of the world that Aristotle has (a] to establish the 

 superiority of his conception of evepyeia over the Platonic 

 conception of ova-La, (b} that he has to distinguish it from 

 the conception of Kivr)&amp;lt;ns or yevecris, which had succumbed 

 to the Platonic criticism. 



The first point is of course easy enough to establish. 

 It suffices to point out that a substance apart from its 

 activity is an abstraction, or, in Aristotle s words, that the 

 actuality is naturally prior to the potentiality, that to be 

 is to be active} This simple truth, that a substantiality 

 which does nothing is nothing, is now of course familiar 

 enough, and perhaps best known in the Herbartian 

 formula, without causality no substantiality, though it 

 lies at the roots also of Hume s criticism of substantiality. 

 But the very fact that it has so often to be reaffirmed 



1 Cp. esp. Eth. Nic. ix. 7. 4 (1168 a 6) tffjj.v d tvepyeiq.. 



P 



