Aristotle, moreover, showed great insight into the present relation of thought and reality. The sequence of facts in our experience, he pointed out, is exactly the reverse of what it is in reality. What is first in reality comes last in our experience, and what is first in our experience is last in reality. To illustrate: the mission of the Athenian State in the eternity of things did not appear until every event in its history had occurred. A perfect being would see the universal ground before the historical particulars derived from it, while we look from the particulars to their universal causes. Logic and metaphysics agree; but they stand in inverted parallelism to historical and psychological processes. Knowledge is a development from the senses into the Ideas, and yet, on the other hand, Aristotle never fails to remind us that this development is the expression of an idea which has been present from the beginning. =Aristotle’s Metaphysics.= =1. Development is Purposeful.= The conception of relation is, of course, quite as fundamental in Aristotle’s theory of metaphysics as in his logic. In logic knowledge of the particular is possible through its relationship to the universal; in metaphysics the relationship is the relationship of development――the particular has significance and value through the universal essence that unfolds from within it. If Aristotle shows genius for abstract thinking by becoming the “Father of Logic,” he shows equal genius for abstract thinking in his metaphysical conception of development. He believed that metaphysics applies the same conditions to things that logic discovers in thought. But in metaphysics the relationship is not the abstract relationship that Aristotle saw in Plato, but the vital relation of development in the life and change of nature. We have already stated the fundamental principle in Aristotle’s teaching as _an unfolding essence in phenomena_. The unfolding is the relationship of development. Reality does not consist in the particular things of nature, nor in something outside nature, but in this essential linkage of the perceptual and conceptual in nature. As the world is spread out before us, it presents objects that are dynamic, however much they may appear to be static. Everywhere matter is in the process of forming. The world is a forming, not a formed nor a formless world. So, also, if you undertook to describe any individual object in the world, you would have to define it as a forming or developing thing. A tree, for example, would not be adequately defined or described by enumerating its parts at any one moment; but you must describe it as a unitary organism developing from a seed. The reality of the world is the development of its meaning in its history; the same is true of the reality of any individual thing in the world. The world and the things therein have an unfolding essence.