Such arguments manifestly tell not only against Platonism, but against every kind of transcendental realism, from the natural theology of Paley to the dogmatic agnosticism of Mr. Herbert Spencer. A modern Aristotle might say that the hypothesis of a creative first cause, personal or otherwise, logically involves the assumption of as many original specific energies as there are qualities to be accounted for, and thus gives us the unnecessary trouble of counting everything twice over; that every difficulty and contradiction from which the transcendental assumption is intended to free us, must, on analysis, reappear in the assumption itself—for example, the God who is to deliver us from evil must be himself conceived as the creator of evil; that the infinite and absolute can neither cause, nor be apprehended by, the finite and relative; that to separate from Nature all the forces required for its perpetuation, and relegate them to a sphere apart, is a false antithesis and a sterile abstraction; lastly, that causation, whether efficient or final, once begun, cannot stop; that if this world is not self-existing, nothing is; that the mutual adaptation of thoughts in a designing intelligence requires to be accounted for just like any other adaptation; that if the relative involves the absolute, so also does the relation between the two involve another absolute, and so on to infinity. * * * * * These are difficulties which will continue to perplex us until every shred of the old metaphysics has been thrown off. To that task Aristotle was not equal. He was profoundly influenced by the very theory against which he contended; and, at the risk of being paradoxical, we may even say that it assumed a greater importance in his system than had ever been attributed to it by Plato himself. To prove this, we must resume the thread of our exposition, and follow the Stagirite still further in his analysis of the fundamental reality with which the highest philosophy is concerned. II.