*Matter and Form*.--Consider any completely developed individual thing, whether it is the product of human manufacture, as a copper bowl, or of natural reproduction, as an oak-tree or a horse. We shall see at once that the bowl is like other articles made of the same metal, candlesticks, coal-vases, in being made of the same stuff, and unlike them in having the special shape or structure which renders it fit for being used as a bowl and not for holding a candle or containing coals. So a botanist or a chemist will tell you that the constituent tissues of an oak or horse, or the chemical elements out of which these tissues are built up are of the same kind as those of an ash or an ox, but the oak differs from the ash or the horse from the ox in characteristic structure. We see thus that in any individual thing we can distinguish two components, the stuff of which it consists--which may be identical in kind with the stuff of which things of a very different kind consist--and the structural law of formation or arrangement which is peculiar to the "special" kind of thing under consideration. In the actual individual thing these two are inseparably united; they do not exist side by side, as chemists say the atoms of hydrogen and oxygen do in a drop of water; the law of organisation or structure is manifested in and through the copper, or the various tissues of the living body. Aristotle expresses this by saying that you can distinguish two aspects in an individual, its Matter, (_hyle, materia_) and its Form (_eidos, forma_). The individual is the matter as organised in accord with a determinate principle of structure, the form. Of these terms, the former, _hyle_ (_materia_, matter) means literally timber, and more specifically ship’s timbers, and his selection of it to mean what is most exactly rendered by our own word "stuff" may perhaps be due to a reminiscence of an old Pythagorean fancy which looked on the universe as a ship. The word for form is the same as Plato’s, and its philosophical uses are closely connected with its mathematical sense, "regular figure," also a Pythagorean technicality which still survives in certain stereotyped phrases in Euclid. Aristotle extends the analysis into Matter and Form by analogy beyond the range of individual substances to everything in which we can distinguish a relatively indeterminate "somewhat" and a law or type of order and arrangement giving it determination. Thus if you consider the relatively fixed or "formed" character of a man in adult life, we may look upon this character as produced out of the "raw material" of tendencies and dispositions, which have received a specific development along definite lines, according to the kind of training to which the mind has been subjected in the "formative" period of its growth. We may therefore speak of native disposition as the matter or stuff of which character is made, and the practical problem of education is to devise a system of training which