The vision of the divine is what is sweetest and best; and if God always enjoys that vision as we sometimes do, it is wonderful, and if he does so in a yet higher degree, it is more wonderful still. And so even it is. And life belongs to him; for the self-determination of thought is life, and he is self-determination. And his absolute self-determination is the supreme and eternal life. And we call God a living being, eternal, best; so that life and duration, uniform and eternal, belong to God; for this is God.--_Id._ We must consider in what way the system of the universe contains the good and the best, whether as something transcendent and self-determined, or as order. Surely in both ways at once, as in any army, for which the good is in order, and is the general, and the latter more than the former. For the general is not due to the order, but the order to the general.--_Id._ The thought of Aristotle differs from that of Plato both in its method and in its results. Plato, reared in the school of Pythagoras, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Socrates, had, naturally enough, come to look for truth in the supersensual region of mind, and thought he found it in ideas attainable by a process of dialectic within the individual consciousness. He thus came to put forward a doctrine which, despite its ostensible purpose to cement the bonds of society, in reality tended to withdraw men from society altogether and increase the very individualism it was intended to cure. Aristotle, while still in Plato's school, had turned away from this doctrine, and in after-life he never lost an opportunity of combating it. He could point to Plato's _Republic_ as a warning example of its logical consequences. But, in doing this, he was prepared to put another doctrine in its place, and he did so on the basis of a profound study of the whole course of Greek thought, mythological and philosophical.