Designer
TWO:Macaulay has spoken as if the Platonic philosophy was totally unrelated to the material wants of men. This, however, is a mistake. It is true that, in the Republic, science is not regarded as an instrument for heaping up fresh luxuries, or for curing the diseases which luxury breeds; but only because its purpose is held to be the discovery of those conditions under which a healthy, happy, and virtuous race can best be reared. The art of the true statesman is to weave the web of life with perfect skill, to bring together those couples from whose union the noblest progeny shall issue; and it is only by mastering the laws of the physical universe that this art can be acquired. Plato knew no natural laws but those of mathematics and astronomy; consequently, he set far too much store on the times and seasons at which bride and bridegroom were to meet, and on the numerical ratios by which they were supposed to be determined. He even tells243 us about a mysterious formula for discovering the nuptial number, by which the ingenuity of commentators has been considerably exercised. The true laws by which marriage should be regulated among a civilised people have remained wrapped in still more impenetrable darkness. Whatever may be the best solution, it can hardly fail to differ in many respects from our present customs. It cannot be right that the most important act in the life of a human being should be determined by social ambition, by avarice, by vanity, by pique, or by accidentin a word, by the most contemptible impulses of which human nature is susceptible; nor is it to be expected that sexual selection will always necessitate the employment of insincerity, adulation, and bribery by one of the parties concerned, while fostering in the other credulity, egoism, jealousy, capriciousness, and petty tyrannythe very qualities which a wise training would have for its object to root out.145Such are the closing words of what was possibly Aristotles last work, the clear confession of his monotheistic creed. A monotheistic creed, we have said, but one so unlike all other religions, that its nature has been continually misunderstood. While some have found in it a theology like that of the Jews or of Plato or of modern Europe, others have resolved it into a vague pantheism. Among the latter we are surprised to find Sir A. Grant, a writer to whom the Aristotelian texts must be perfectly familiar both in spirit and in letter. Yet nothing can possibly be more clear and emphatic than the declarations they contain. Pantheism identifies God with the world; Aristotle separates them as pure form from form more or less alloyed with matter. Pantheism denies personality to God; Aristotle gives him unity, spirituality, self-consciousness, and happiness. If these qualities do not collectively involve personality, we should like to know what does. Need we351 remind the accomplished editor of the Nicomachean Ethics how great a place is given in that work to human self-consciousness, to waking active thought as distinguished from mere slumbering faculties or unrealised possibilities of action? And what Aristotle regarded as essential to human perfection, he would regard as still more essential to divine perfection. Finally, the God of pantheism is a general idea; the God of Aristotle is an individual. Sir A. Grant says that he (or it) is the idea of Good.247 We doubt very much whether there is a single passage in the Metaphysics to sanction such an expression. Did it occur, however, that would be no warrant for approximating the Aristotelian to the Platonic theology, in presence of such a distinct declaration as that the First Mover is both conceptually and numerically one,248 coming after repeated repudiations of the Platonic attempt to isolate ideas from the particulars in which they are immersed. Then Sir A. Grant goes on to speak of the desire felt by Nature for God as being itself God,249 and therefore involving a belief in pantheism. Such a notion is not generally called pantheism, but hylozoism, the attribution of life to matter. We have no desire, however, to quarrel about words. The philosopher who believes in the existence of a vague consciousness, a spiritual effort towards something higher diffused through nature, may, if you will, be called a pantheist, but not unless this be the only divinity he recognises. The term is altogether misleading when applied to one who also proclaims the existence of something in his opinion far higher, better and more reala living God, who transcends Nature, and is independent of her, although she is not independent of him.
