The moving object is moved perhaps by another moving object. The motion of the latter demands a further cause. If this further cause is itself moving, we must again ask for the cause of its motion. If this process goes on for ever, then motion is unexplained, and no real cause of it has been shown. The real and ultimate cause must therefore be unmoved. This last argument sounds as if Aristotle is now thinking in terms of mechanism. It sounds as if he meant that {285} the first mover is something at the beginning of time, which, so to speak, gave things a push to start them off. This is not what Aristotle means. For the true efficient cause is the final cause. And God is the first mover only in His character as absolute end. As far as time is concerned, neither the universe, nor the motion in it, ever had any beginning. Every mechanical cause has its cause in turn, and so _ad infinitum_. God is not a first cause, in our sense, that is, a first mechanical cause which existed before the world, and created it. He is a teleological cause working from the end. But as such, He is logically prior to all beginning, and so is the first mover. And just as the universe has no beginning in time, so it has no end in time. It will go on for ever. Its end is absolute form, but this can never be reached, because if it were, this would mean that absolute form would exist, whereas we have seen that form cannot exist apart from matter. God is thought. But the thought of what? As absolute form, he is not the form of matter, but the form of form. His matter, so to speak, is form. Form, as the universal, is thought. And this gives us Aristotle's famous definition of God as "the thought of thought." He thinks only his own self. He is at once the subject and the object of his thought. As mortal men think material things, as I now think the paper on which I write, so God thinks thought. In more modern terms, he is self-consciousness, the absolute subject-object. That God should think anything other than thought is inconceivable, because the end of all other thought is outside the thought itself. If I think this paper, the end of my thought, the paper, is outside me. But the thought of {286} God, as the absolute end, cannot have any end outside itself. Were God to think anything else than thought, he would be determined by that which is not himself. By way of further expression of the same idea, Aristotle passes into figurative language. God, he says, lives in eternal blessedness, and his blessedness consists in the everlasting contemplation of his own perfection.