schemes, or forms, of which natural things are merely transient phantoms, and which can be reached by only a few aristocratic souls, born to rule the rest.  On the basis of this distortion he constructed his Republic, in which complete despotism is exercised by the philosophers through the military; man is reduced to a machine, his affections and will being disregarded; community of women and of property is the law; and science is scouted.

Aristotle’s philosophy may be said to be a protest against this view, and an attempt to show that reality is embodied in nature, which depends on a supreme intelligence, and may be realized in other intelligences, or thought-centres, such as the human mind.  In other words, according to Aristotle, truth is actual in the world and potential in all minds, which may by experience put on its forms.  Thus the individualism of the Sophists and the despotism of Plato are overcome, while an important place is made for experience, or science.

Aristotle, accepting the world of common-sense, tried to rationalize it; that is, to realize it in himself.  First among the Greeks he believed it to be unique, uncreated, and eternal, and gave his reasons.  Recognizing that the phenomenal world exists in change, he investigated the principle and method of this.  Change he conceives as a transition from potentiality to actuality, and as always due to something actualized, communicating its form to something potential.  Looking at the “world” as a whole, and picturing it as limited, globular, and constructed like an onion, with the earth in the centre, and round about it nine concentric spheres carrying the planets and stars, he concludes that there must be at one end something purely actual and therefore unchanging,—­that is, pure form or energy; and at the other, something purely potential and therefore changing,—­that is, pure matter or latency.  The pure actuality is at the circumference, pure matter at the centre.  Matter, however, never exists without some form.  Thus, nature is an eternal circular process between the actual and the potential.  The supreme Intelligence, God, being pure energy, changelessly thinks himself, and through the love inspired by his perfection moves the outmost sphere; which would move all the rest were it not for inferior intelligences, fifty-six in number, who, by giving them different directions, diversify the divine action and produce the variety of the world.  The celestial world is composed of eternal matter, or aether, whose only change is circular motion; the sublunary world is composed of changing matter, in four different but mutually transmutable forms—­fire, air, water, earth—­movable in two opposite directions, in straight lines, under the ever-varying influence of the celestial spheres.