A modern will naturally ask whether Aristotle's God is personal. It does not do to be very dogmatic upon the point. Aristotle, like Plato, never discusses the question. No Greek ever did. It is a modern question. What we have to do, then, is to take the evidence on both sides. The case for personality is that the language Aristotle uses implies it. The very word God, used instead of the Absolute, or form, conveys the idea of personality. And when he goes on to speak of God living in eternal blessedness, these words, if taken literally, can mean nothing except that God is a conscious person. If we say that this language is merely figurative, it may be replied that Aristotle on principle objects to figurative language, that he frequently censures Plato for using it, that what he demands and sets out to supply is exact, literal, scientific terminology, and that he is not likely to have broken his own canons of philosophic expression by using merely poetical phrases. To see the other side of the case, we must first ask what personality means. Now without entering into an intricate discussion of this most elusive idea, we may answer that personality at any rate implies an _individual_ and _existent_ consciousness. But, in the first place, God is absolute form, and form is the universal. What is universal, with no particular in it, cannot be an individual. {287} God, therefore, cannot be individual. Secondly, form without matter cannot exist. And as God is form without matter, he cannot be called existent, though he is absolutely real. God, therefore, is neither existent nor individual. And this means that he is not a person. To degrade the real to the level of the existent, to convert the universal into the individual, is exactly the fault for which Aristotle blames Plato. It is exactly the fault which it was the whole object of his philosophy to remedy. If he thought that God is a person, he committed the same fault himself in an aggravated form.