322 CREATIVE EVOLUTION [chap. 



the Form of Forms, the Idea of Ideas, or, to use his own 

 words, the Thought of Thought. Such is the God of 

 Aristotle — necessarily immutable and apart from what is 

 happening in the world, since he is only the synthesis of 

 all concepts in a single concept. It is true that no one 

 of the manifold concepts could exist apart, such as it is in 

 the divine unity: in vain should we look for the ideas of 

 Plato within the God of Aristotle. But if only we im- 

 agine the God of Aristotle in a sort of refraction of him- 

 self, or simply inclining toward the world, at once the 

 Platonic Ideas are seen to pour themselves out of him, 

 as if they were involved in the unity of his essence: so rays 

 stream out from the sun, which nevertheless did not contain 

 them. It is probably this possibility of an outpouring of 

 Platonic Ideas from the Aristotelian God that is meant, 

 in the philosophy of Aristotle, by the active intellect, the 

 vobs that has been called 7zoct)xck6s — that is, by what is 

 essential and yet unconscious in human intelligence. The 

 vous nocrjuKos is Science entire, posited all at once, which 

 the conscious, discursive intellect is condemned to re- 

 construct with difficulty, bit by bit. There is then with- 

 in us, or rather behind us, a possible vision of God, as 

 the Alexandrians said, a vision always virtual, never 

 actually realized by the conscious intellect. In this in- 

 tuition we should see God expand in Ideas. This it is 

 that "does everything," 1 playing in relation to the dis- 

 cursive intellect, which moves in time, the same role as the 

 motionless Mover himself plays in relation to the movement 

 of the heavens and the course of things. 



There is, then, immanent in the philosophy of Ideas, 

 a particular conception of causality, which it is important 



1 Aristotle, De anima, 430 a 14 kou loxtv 5 ph> xocoircos vous xco navxa 

 fiveodcu, 6 de T<p navxa Tzotsh), <bs e$ts xcs, ocov x6 <p&s. xpemov yap 

 xtva no. xb <pa>s nocec xa. duvapec ovxa xpupaxa ivepyet'a ypu)p.a-a. 



