the great Christian theologians who built upon Aristotle could not absolutely break with him on this point. St. Thomas, though obliged to admit that the world was actually created a few thousand years before his own time, maintains that this can only be known to be true from revelation, philosophically it is equably tenable that the world should have been "created from all eternity." And it is the general doctrine of scholasticism that the expression "creation" only denotes the absolute dependence of the world on God for its being. When we say "God created the world out of nothing," we mean that He did not make it out of pre-existing matter, that it depends for its being on Him only; the expression is purely negative in its import. *God*.--With the doctrine of the eternity of the world and the processes which make up its life we come close to the culminating theory of Aristotelian First Philosophy, its doctrine of God, as the eternal, unchanging source of all change, movement, and process. All motion is a process within matter by which the forms latent in it are brought into actual manifestation. And the process only takes place in the presence of an adequate efficient cause or source of motion. Hence the eternity of natural processes involves the existence of one or more eternal sources of motion. For, if we do not admit the existence of an unoriginated and ever-present source or sources of motion, our only alternative is to hold that the world-process is due to a series of sources of motion existing successively. But such a view would leave the unity and unbroken continuity of the world-process unaccounted for. It would give us a succession of processes, temporally contiguous, not one unbroken process. Hence we argue from the continuity of motion to its dependence on a source or sources which are permanent and present throughout the whole everlasting world-process. And when we come to the question whether there is only one such ultimate source of movement for the whole universe, or several, Aristotle’s answer is that the supreme "Unmoved Mover" is one. One is enough for the purpose, and the law of parcimony forbids us to assume the superfluous. This then is the Aristotelian conception of God and God’s relation to the world. God is the one supreme unchanging being to whose presence the world responds with the whole process of cosmic development, the ultimate educer of the series of "forms" latent in the "matter" of the world into actual manifestation. Standing, as He does, outside the whole process which by His mere presence He initiates in Nature, He is not himself a composite of "form" and "matter," as the products of development are. He is a pure individual "form" or "actuality," with no history of gradual development behind it. Thus He is a purely immaterial being, indispensable to the world’s existence but transcending it and standing outside it. _How_ His presence inspires the world to move Aristotle tries to explain by