212 HUMANISM 



XII 



motion. And change of all things is sweet, as the poet 

 hath it, because of a certain defect.&quot; ] 



The immense significance of this passage has been 

 strangely overlooked and the commentators say singularly 

 little about it. Thus, of the two latest editors of the 

 Ethics, Prof. Stewart accuses Aristotle of waxing poetical, 

 while Prof. Burnet finds nothing to say about it at all ; 

 and as this has occurred after I had vainly attempted to 

 call attention to it, 2 I think I may assume that still 

 further comment is needed to help modern minds to 

 grasp the beauty and importance of Aristotle s thought. 



Ill 



It follows from the above that the perfect or divine 

 life is one of unceasing and unchanging activity, which is 

 also an eternal consciousness of supreme happiness. And 

 yet nothing happens in it. It is eternal, not in the illusory 

 sense in which geometrical triangles and epistemological 

 monstrosities (like e.g. Green s Eternal Self -Consciousness} 

 are put out of Time by a trick of abstraction, but because 

 it can be shown to have a positive nature, which precludes 

 the conditions which engender time-consciousness. For, 

 as Aristotle was well aware, (objective) Time is a creature 

 of Motion ; it depends on the motions whereby alone it 

 can be measured ; it is the number of motion (/az^crea)? 

 apt6/ji6&amp;lt;i). If then tcivrja-is arises out of the imperfection 

 of an eVepyeta, the perfecting of an evep&amp;lt;yeia will necessarily 

 involve the disappearance of Time, together with that of 

 Motion. Or, as I have elsewhere expressed it, 3 Time is 

 the measure of the impermanence of the imperfect, and 

 the perfecting of the time-consciousness would carry us 

 out of Time into Eternity. In other words, the conception 

 of Rvepyeia A/a^tna? is a scientific formulation of the 



word in order to express the steady and effortless maintenance of a perfect 

 equilibrium. Cp. An. Post. ii. 19, where the same word is used to describe the 

 emergence of the logical universal, i.e. of the constancy of meaning, out of the 

 flux of psychological ideas. : Cp. also Metaph. A. 7, 1072 b 16. 



2 Riddles of the Sphinx, p. 443, new ed. p. 424. 3 Ibid. ch. ix. n. 



