AND ITS SELF-CONSERVATION. 213 



required for its perfection. That is, it is self -cause, and 

 as such is necessarily an eternal process, forever com- 

 plete in itself. Nothing can be conceived as existing 

 beyond it or apart from it. It is the vital sum of all 

 reality; the absolute, self -forming substance; the supreme 

 truth, or final cause. 



But this vital, self-differentiating unity, while it is 

 seen to be the final cause in the. sense of ultimate per- 

 fection, is just as clearly the primal cause in the sense 

 that everything necessarily presupposes the existence of 

 the perfect cause. In, and through that, all things 

 necessarily have their being. Apart from it they are 

 not merely as nothing; rather, apart from it, they must 

 literally be nothing. 



As final cause it is infinite act, and hence, abso- 

 lute actuality, it is the infinite, eternal Unit which as 

 such is "without variableness or shadow of turning." 

 In it potentiality and reality absolutely coincide. As a 

 whole it cannot change. It is, therefore, not subject to 

 time, which is nothing else than the abstract form of 

 change. Time is in this total, but the total itself cannot 

 be in time. It is the perfect World-Energy, and as such 

 all possible phases of change are produced within it, 

 while of it there can be no change. The changing 

 proves to be a phase of the changeless, and therefore time 

 proves to be a mode of the timeless, just as the meas- 

 urable in another way proved to be merely a phase of the 

 measureless. 



The self-active, self-realizing World-Energy is, then, 

 the spontaneous, efficient and sufficient cause of all move- 

 ment. It is that for which we have from the first been 

 seeking. It is the final cause which is seen to be in itself 



