The question of the _ultimate_ purpose of the universe is for Maimonides an idle question, because it is not within our power to find a satisfactory answer. For whatever purpose we find, it is always possible to ask: What is the purpose of that purpose? And in the end we are bound to say: “God willed it so,” or, “His wisdom decided so.” But at the same time Maimonides agrees with Aristotle and his school that the _proximate_ purpose of all that exists in this world of ours is man. For in that “course of genesis and destruction” which goes on in all the genera of existing things we see a kind of striving on the part of matter to attain to the most perfect form possible (“to produce the most perfect being that can be produced”); and since “man is the most perfect being formed of matter,” it follows that “in this respect it can truly be said that all earthly things exist for man.”[104] Now if man is the proximate purpose of all things on earth, “we are compelled to inquire further, why man exists and what was the purpose of his creation.” Maimonides’ view of the human soul being what it is, there is, of course, a ready answer to this question. The purpose of man’s existence, like that of all material existence, is “to produce the most perfect being that can be produced”: and what is the most perfect being if not the possessor of the “acquired intellect,” who has attained the most perfect form possible to man? The purpose of man’s life, then, is “to picture the Ideas in his soul.” For “only wisdom can add to his inner strength and raise him from low to high estate; for he was a man potentially, and has now become a man actually, and man before he thinks and acquires knowledge is esteemed an animal.”[105] But if this is so, can we still ask what is the highest moral duty and what is the most perfect moral good? Obviously, there is no higher moral duty than this: that man strive to fulfil that purpose for which he was created; and there is no more perfect moral good than the fulfilment of that purpose. All other human activities are only “to preserve man’s existence, to the end that that one activity may be fulfilled.”[106]