AMONG THE GREEKS 81 



ing in Nature, or as having established a pre- 

 ordained harmony. Romanes points out that 

 Aristotle, in his Mctaphjjsics, asks the crucial 

 question whether the principle of order and ex- 

 cellence (i. e. the operation of natural laws) is 

 self-existing from the beginning, or whether, like 

 the discipline of an army, it is apparently in- 

 herent, but really due to a general in the back- 

 ground. 



Whether or not Aristotle viewed the Prime 

 Mover as sustaining his laws or as having pre- 

 ordained them, he certainly does not believe in 

 Special Creation by divine fiat either of adapta- 

 tions or of organisms, nor in the interference of 

 the Prime Mover in Nature; the struggle to- 

 ward perfection is a natural process, as where he 

 says: ''It w due to the resistance of matter to 

 form that Nature can only rise by degrees from 

 lower to higher types J' There is, therefore, no 

 doubt that he was not a teleologist in the modern 

 supernatural sense ; at the very heart of his the- 

 ory of Evolution was this 'internal perfecting 

 tendency,'^ driving organisms progressively for- 

 ward into more perfect types. 



He viewed man as the flower of Nature, to- 

 ward which all had been tending, the crowning 

 end, purpose, or final cause. His nature philoso- 



iCompare Hans Driesch: The Science and Philosophy of the 

 Organism. 



