mean everlasting in time. It means timeless. And reason, even our reason, is timeless. The soul has eternity in it. It is "eternity in an hour." And it is this which puts the difference between man and the brutes. {304} We have traced the scale of being from inorganic matter, through plants and animals, to man. What then? What is the next step? Or does the scale stop there? Now there is a sort of break in Aristotle's system at this point, which has led many to say that man is the top of the scale. The rest of Aristotle's physics deal with what is outside our earth, such as the stars and planets. And they deal with them quite as if they were a different subject, having little or nothing to do with the terrestrial scale of being which we have been considering. But here we must not forget two facts. The first is that Aristotle's writings have come down to us mutilated, and in many cases unfinished. The second is that Aristotle had a curious habit of writing separate monographs on different parts of his system, and omitting to point out any connexion between them, although such a connexion undoubtedly exists. Now although Aristotle himself does not say it, there are several good reasons for thinking that the true interpretation of his meaning is that the scale of being does not stop at man, that there is no gap in the chain here, but that it proceeds from man through planets and stars--which Aristotle, like Plato, regarded as divine beings--right up to God himself. In the first place, this is required by the logic of his system. The scale has formless matter at the bottom and matterless form at the top. It should proceed direct from one to the other. It is essential to his philosophy that the universe is a single continuous chain. There is no place for such a hiatus between man and the higher beings. Secondly, it is not as if terrestrial life formed a scale, and celestial beings were all on a par, having among themselves no {305} scale of higher and lower. This is not the case. The heavenly bodies have grades among themselves. The higher are related to the lower as form to matter. Thus stars are higher than planets. So that if we suppose that evolution stops at man, what we have is a gap in the middle, a scale below it, and a scale above it. It is like a bridge over a sheet of water, the two ends of which are intact, but which is broken down in the middle. The natural completion of this scheme involves the filling up of the gap. Thirdly, we have another very important piece of evidence. With his valuable idea of evolution Aristotle combined another very curious, and no doubt, absurd, theory. This was that in the scale of the universe the lowest existence is to be found in the middle, the highest at the periphery, and that in general the higher is always outside the lower, so that the spatial universe is a system of concentric spheres, the outer sphere being related to the inner sphere as higher to lower, as form to matter. At