We have, then, two hypotheses, both of which involve that Aristotle was guilty of some inconsistency. If God is not a person, then Aristotle's language is figurative, and his use of such language is inconsistent with his rooted objection to its use. This, however, is, after all, merely an inconsistency of language, and not of thought. It does not mean that Aristotle really contradicted himself. It merely means that, though he set himself to express his philosophy in technical scientific terms, and to exclude figurative language, yet he found himself compelled in a few passages to make use of it. There are some metaphysical ideas so abstract, so abstruse, that it is almost impossible to express them at all without the use of figures of speech. Language was made by common men for common purposes, and this fact often forces the philosopher to use terms which he knows only figure forth his meaning without accurately expressing it. Perhaps every philosophy in the world finds itself sometimes under this necessity, and, if Aristotle did so, and was thereby technically inconsistent with himself, it is no wonder, and involves no serious blame upon him. {288} But the other hypothesis, that God is a person, means that Aristotle committed a contradiction, not merely in words, but in thought, and not merely as regards some unimportant detail, but as regards the central thesis of his system. It means that he stultified himself by making his conception of God absolutely contradict the essentials of his system. For what is the whole of Aristotle's philosophy, put in a nutshell? It is that the Absolute is the universal, but that the universal does not exist apart from the particular. Plato supplied the thought of the first clause of the sentence. Aristotle added the last clause, and it is the essential of his philosophy. To assert that God, the absolute form, exists as an individual, is flatly to contradict this. It is not likely that Aristotle should have contradicted himself in so vital a matter, and in a manner which simply means that his system falls to the ground like a house of cards. My conclusion, then, is that it was not Aristotle's intention that what he calls God should be regarded as a person. God is thought, but not subjective thought. He is not thought existent in a mind, but objective thought, real on its own account, apart from any mind which thinks it, like Plato's Ideas. But Plato's mistake was to suppose that because thought is real and objective, it must exist. Aristotle avoids this error. The absolute thought is the absolutely real. But it does not exist. With the concept of God the metaphysics of Aristotle closes. 4. Physics, or the Philosophy of Nature.