That the ultimate principle of conduct is affectional and volitional; that God is love; that access to the principle is by faith, a personal attitude; that belief, surpassing logical basis and warrant, works out through its own operation its own fulfilling evidence: such was the implied moral metaphysic of Christianity. But this implication needed to become a theory, a theology, a formulation; and in this need, it found no recourse save to philosophies that had identified true existence with the proper object of logical reason. For, in Greek thought, after the valuable meanings, the meanings of industry and art that appealed to sustained and serious choice, had given birth and status to reflective reason, reason denied its ancestry of organized endeavor, and proclaimed itself in its function of self-conscious logical thought to be the author and warrant of all genuine things. Yet how nearly Christianity had found prepared for it the needed means of its own intellectual statement! We recall Aristotle’s account of moral knowing, and his definition of man. Man as man, he tells us, is a principle that may be termed either desiring thought or thinking desire. Not as pure intelligence does _man_ know, but as an organization of desires effected through reflection upon their own conditions and consequences. What if Aristotle had only assimilated his idea of theoretical to his notion of practical knowledge! Because practical thinking was so human, Aristotle rejected it in favor of pure, passionless cognition, something superhuman. Thinking desire is experimental, is tentative, not absolute. It looks to the future and to the past for help in the future. It is contingent, not necessary. It doubly relates to the individual: to the individual thing as experienced by an individual agent; not to the universal. Hence desire is a sure sign of defect, of privation, of non-being, and seeks surcease in something which knows it not. Hence desiring reason culminating in beliefs relating to imperfect existence, stands forever in contrast with passionless reason functioning in pure knowledge, logically complete, of perfect being.