It is not merely what we are born _as_, or what the world begins with, that comes of itself. The most ordinary conception of growth involves maturity, and the term nature in Greek and Latin, as in English, can indicate not only what we are born _as_, but what we are born _for_, our true, or real, or complete nature. Thus the great thinkers of every age have been led to something like Aristotle’s conception, “what a thing is when its growth is completed, that is what we call its nature [1] (growth or evolution)”; and so, if we are to think of “nature” as a whole, it will not be, {131} as when we speak of “natural” science, an outward world, whether of atoms or of organisms, contrasted both with God and with Man, “for nature in Aristotle is not the outward world of created things; it is the creative force, the productive principle of the universe.” [2] To us, inclined to contrast the natural at once with the human and the divine, there is something startling in the vivid reality with which the Greek thinkers hold the three ideas together. The creative activity of the divine principle seems for Plato to be actually one with growth, or nature, or evolution. [3] It may be of interest to cite the great passage in which Plato lays his finger on the common fallacy. [4] “Many learned men say that the elements and inorganic and organic world below man came by nature and chance, but that law and justice and man’s works and social institutions and religion are merely conventional, variable, and untrue. But we must maintain that law and religion and man’s works exist by nature, or are not lower than nature, being the products of mind according to right reason.” ... “For they give the name of nature to the origin of the earliest things; [5] but if really mind is earliest of all things, then _it_ may rightly be said to be superlatively natural.” [1] Aristotle, _Pol_., i. i. [2] Butcher, _Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art_, p. 116. [3] _Republic_, x. 597. [4] _Laws_, 889 ff. abridged. [5] We are not dealing here with Platonic interpretation, but it seems necessary to point out that, literally taken, this passage accepts the principle that nature = primary genesis, and sets out to prove mind to be natural in this sense. We might rather reject the appeal to succession in Time altogether, as at bottom Plato means to. But we see how emphatically mind is for Plato the superlatively natural.