Aristotle deserves, too, the credit of having produced the only philosophy of evolution which the world has ever seen, with the exception of that of Hegel; and Hegel was enabled to found a newer theory of evolution only by following largely in the footsteps of Aristotle. This was perhaps Aristotle's most original contribution to thought. Yet the factors of the problem, though not its solution, he took from his predecessors. The problem of becoming had tortured Greek thought from the earliest ages. The philosophy of Heracleitus, in which it was most prominent, had failed to solve it. Heracleitus and his successors racked their brains to discover how becoming could be possible. But even if they had solved this minor problem, the greater question still remained in the background, what does this becoming mean? Becoming for them was only meaningless change. It was not development. The world-process was an endless stream of futile and purposeless events, "a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Aristotle not merely asked himself how becoming is possible. He showed that becoming has a meaning, that it signifies something, that the world-process is a rationally ordered development towards a rational end. But, though Aristotle's philosophy is the highest presentation of the truth in ancient times, it cannot be accepted as anything final and faultless. Doubtless no philosophy can ever attain to finality. Let us apply our {334} two-fold test. Does his principle explain the world, and does it explain itself? First, does it explain the world? The cause of Plato's failure here was the dualism in his system between sense and thought, between matter and the Ideas. It was impossible to derive the world from the Ideas, because they were absolutely separated from the world. The gulf was so great that it could never be bridged. Matter and Idea lay apart, and could never be brought together. Now Aristotle saw this dualism in Plato, and attempted to surmount it. The universal and the particular, he said, do not thus lie apart, in different worlds. The Idea is not a thing here, and matter a thing there, so that these two incommensurables have to be somehow mechanically and violently forced together to form a world. Universal and particular, matter and form, are inseparable. The connexion between them is not mechanical, but organic. The dualism of Plato is thus admitted and refuted. But is it really surmounted? The answer must be in the negative. It is not enough by a _tour de force_ to bring matter and form together, to assert that they are inseparable, while they remain all the time, in principle, separate entities. If the Absolute is form, matter ought to be deduced from form, shown to be merely a projection and manifestation of it. It must be shown that form not only moulds matter but produces it. If we assert that the one primal reality is form, then clearly we must prove that all else in