Phenomena had for Plato existence without reality, that is, without intelligibility or value. They were a mere appearance. We need not be surprised, then, that he refused altogether to construct a theology by the poetic interpretation of phenomena and preferred to construct one allegorically out of his moral conceptions, the good and the ideal. Aristotle, too, while adhering incidentally, as we have seen, to a purified astronomical theology, capped this with a purified moral theology of his own. The Platonic picture-gallery of ideas, with the abstract principle of excellence that unified them, gave place in his philosophy to an Ideal realized in the concrete and existing as an individual. We may venture to say that among the thinkers of all nations Aristotle was the first to reach the conception of what may fitly be called God. Neither the national deity of the Hebrews, as then conceived, nor the natural deities of the Gentiles, nor the half-physical, half-logical abstractions of the earlier Greek philosophers really corresponded to the notion of a being spiritual, personal, and perfect, immutable without being abstract, and omnipotent without effort and without degradation. Aristotle first constructed this ideal, not out of his fancy, but by building on the solid ground of human nature and following to their point of union the lines which moral aspiration and effort actually follow. Nay, the ideal he pointed to was to be the goal not of human life only but of natural life in all its forms. The analytic study of Nature (a study which at the same time must be imaginative and sympathetic) could guide us to the conception of her inner needs and tendencies and of what their proper fulfilment would be. We could then see that this fulfilment would lie in intelligence and thought. Growth is for the sake of the fruition of life, and the fruition of life consists in the pursuit and attainment of objects. The moral virtues belong to the pursuit, the intellectual to the attainment. Knowledge is the end of all endeavour, the justification and fulfilment of all growth. Intelligence is the clarification of love.