ARISTOTLE. 



51 



fitness, adaptation, or purpose, the good of each and 

 all; the fourth, presiding over all, is the 'Efficient 

 cause,' the Prime Mover, or God., Aristotle attrib- 

 uted all the imperfections of Nature to the stru<'-<de 

 between the material and formal causes, — to the 

 resistance of matter to form. There is room for 

 difference of opinion as to whether he considered 

 the Efificient cause, or God, as constantly present 

 and working in Nature, or as having established a 

 preordained harmony. Romanes points out that 

 Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, asks the question 

 whether the principle of order and excellence is self- 

 existing from the beginning (i.e. the operation of 

 natural laws), or whether, like the discipline of an 

 army, it is apparently inherent, but really due to a 

 general in the background. 



Whether or not Aristotle viewed the Prime Mover 

 as sustaining his laws or as having preordained them, 

 he certainly does not believe in Special Creation, 

 either of adaptations or of organisms, nor in the 

 interference of the Prime Mover in Nature ; the 

 struggle towards perfection is a natural process, 

 as where he says : " It is due to the resistance of 

 matter to form that Nature can only rise by de- 

 grees from lower to higher types." There is, there- 

 fore, no doubt that he was not a teleologist in the 

 ordinary sense; at the very heart of his theory of 

 Evolution was this 'internal perfecting tendency,' 

 driving organisms progressively forward into more 

 perfect types. He viewed man as the flower of 



