Note 24 — Chapter I · INTRODUCTORY

This is an important essay. It reminds the modern reader, for one thing, of the importance of the natural theology of Aristotle. It is an anticipation, too, in its way, of the tendency of modern physics to substitute a dynamic for a static conception of matter, or atoms, or substance. In it Dr. Schiller points out how Aristotle’s doctrine of a perfect and self-perfecting Activity [an ἐνέργεια that is not mere change or motion, but a perfect “life” involving the disappearance of “time” and imperfection] is in a sense the solution of the old [Greek] and the modern demand for the substance or essence of things. We shall take occasion (in speaking of the importance to Philosophy of the concept of activity, and in speaking of the Philosophy of Bergson) to use the same idea, to which Dr. Schiller has given an expression in this essay, of God as the eternal or the perfect life of the world.