they had been planned, and yet they were not planned but merely fell out so: and since such a combination of circumstances simulating design is unusual, it is not proper to say that the events happened "in the course of Nature." We therefore say it happened by chance. This doctrine of chance has its significance for mediæval Ethics. In an age when the Protestant superstition that worldly success is proof of nearness to God had not yet been invented, the want of correspondence between men’s "deserts" and their prosperity was accounted for by the view that the distribution of worldly goods is, as a rule, the work of Fortune or Chance in the Aristotelian sense; that is, it is due to special coincidences which may look like deliberate design but are not really so. (See the elaborate exposition of this in Dante, _Inferno_, vii. 67-97.) *Motion*.--We have seen that causation, natural or artificial, requires the production in a certain "matter" of a certain "form" under the influence of a certain "agent." What is the character of the process set up by the agent in the matter and culminating in the appearance of the form? Aristotle answers that it is Motion (_kinesis_). The effect of the agent on the matter is to set up in it a motion which ends in its assuming a definite form. The important point to be noted here is that Aristotle regards this motion as falling wholly within the matter which is to assume the form. It is not necessary that the agent should itself be in motion, but only that it should induce motion in something else. Thus in all cases of intentional action the ultimate efficient cause is the "idea of the result to be attained," but this idea does not move about. By its presence to the mind it sets something else (the members of the body) moving. This conception of an efficient cause which, not moving itself, by its mere presence induces movement in that to which it is present, is of the highest importance in Aristotle’s theology. Of course it follows that since the motion by which the transition from potentiality to actuality is achieved falls wholly within the matter acted upon, Aristotle is not troubled with any of the questions as to the way in which motion can be transferred from one body to another which were so much agitated in the early days of the modern mechanical interpretation of natural processes. Aristotle’s way of conceiving Nature is thoroughly non-mechanical, and approximates to what would now be called the ascription of vital or quasi-vital characteristics to the inorganic. As, in the causality of "art" the mere presence of the "form" to be embodied in a given material to the mind of the craftsman brings about and directs the process of manufacture, so in some analogous fashion the presence of an efficient cause in Nature to that on which it works is thought of as itself constituting the "efficiency" of the cause. As Lotze phrases it, things "take note of" one another’s