Progress in Art, and I should like to return to the general Greek conception of the tendency in all nature towards the Good, the perfect realization of perfect types.
Plato does not expressly insist that this tendency is of the nature of effort, though I think that is involved in his view. But Aristotle does. Following Plato in essentials, he makes bold to say outright that every natural thing in its own way longs for the divine and desires to share in the divine life, so far as it can.[11] Every such thing in this world of space and time has to cope with difficulties and is imperfect, but everything struggles towards the good. That good is in the life of God, a thinking life, an activity of thought, existing in some sense beyond this imperfect world; and this life is so supremely desirable that it makes everything else struggle to reach it. It moves the whole world, Aristotle says, in a famous passage, because it is loved. It is the world's desire.[12]
Now this idea of effort—or of something analogous to effort—constituting the inner nature of every natural thing reappears, with pregnant consequences, in modern thought, though seldom with these vast theological consequences. The idea of an upward effort through nature lies at the base of our most hopeful theories of evolution, and forms the true support of our modern faith in progress. Broadly speaking, our evolutionists are now divided into two schools: the adherents of the one believe that variations are purely accidental, and may occur in any direction whatsoever, the useful ones being preserved only because they happen to be useful for the life of the species, while the adherents of the other—the school that I would call the school of hope—believe that accident, even with natural selection to aid it, is utterly inadequate to account for the ordered beauty and harmony that we do see in natural things. They admit, as Plato and Aristotle admit, imperfection and difficulty in the world, but they insist on a movement towards value: in short, they conceive an order emerging that is brought about, to quote a modern writer, both in nature and in society, by 'a principle of movement and progress conflicting with a principle of inertia.'[13]
Aristotle, in words that are strikingly modern, raises the very question at issue here.[14] He asks whether we can suppose that nature does not aim at the good at all, but that variations arise by chance and are preserved just because they are useful, and he scouts the idea that chance could do more, as Zeller says, than 'bring about isolated and abnormal results'. He chooses instead the conception of purpose and effort, and this in spite of the difficulties in conceiving a purpose and an effort that are not definitely conscious. The sort of thing that is in Aristotle's mind when he speaks of nature aiming at the good, comes out in a passage by Edward Carpenter in his little book The Art of Creation. Carpenter plunges boldly and compares the principle that makes a tree grow and propagate its kind with the impulse that makes a man express himself. Man, he says,
has a Will and Purpose, a Character, which, do what you will, tends to push outwards towards expression. You put George Fox in prison, you flog and persecute him, but the moment he has a chance he goes and preaches just the same as before. … But take a Tree and you notice exactly the same thing. A dominant Idea informs the life of the Tree; persisting, it forms the tree. You may snip the leaves as much as you like to a certain pattern, but they will only grow in their own shape. Finally, you may cut the tree down root and branch and burn it, but, if there is left a single seed, within that seed … lurks the formative ideal, which under proper conditions will again spring into life and expression.[15]
Aristotle would have endorsed almost every word of this. In his pithy way, speaking of the distinction between natural and artificial objects, he says himself that if you planted a wooden bed and the wood could still grow, it would grow up, not a bed, but a tree.[16]
He would not have gone so far as to talk about the Will of a tree, but he would have admitted that what made the tree grow was the same sort of thing as Will. And in one respect he goes farther than Edward Carpenter does. For he considers that not only growth but even the movement of natural things through space is somehow an expression of a tendency towards the good and the divine, a tendency which, when consciousness supervenes, we can call effort, an activity, even though, at its best, only an imperfect activity. He looks up at the splendour of the circling stars and asks if it is possible that so glorious an order can be anything but a manifestation of something akin to the divine. Here indeed he is speaking of movements made by existences he reckoned among the highest in the world, for he thought the stars were living beings higher than man. But he recognized a rudimentary form of such activity even in what we now call inanimate matter. Here we come to a leading conception of Aristotle's, and one most important for our purpose: the conception of a hierarchy of natural existences, all of them with some value, less or more. When Aristotle is truest to himself, he will tell us not to be afraid of studying the meanest forms of natural existence, because in everything there is something marvellous and divine. He quotes with much satisfaction the story of Heracleitus, who welcomed his friends into the bakehouse with the saying that 'there were gods in the bakehouse too'.[17]
Thus, at the lowest end of the scale, we have what we call inanimate matter, which Aristotle thinks of much as we do, namely, as something occupying space, the different parts of it being endowed with different powers of movement, and with different properties, such as warmth or coldness, wetness or dryness. A natural thing, he says, is a thing that has a principle of activity in itself, something that makes it act in a definite way, whenever it is not interfered with by anything else.[18] Aristotle speaks, for example, of fire having a natural tendency to mount up, much as we might speak of solids having a natural tendency to gravitate towards one another. Go back as far as we like, and, Aristotle thinks, we still find certain primitive differences which constitute what we call the primitive elements. This, I imagine, is much the point of view of modern science.
And these primitive elements in Aristotle's view influence each other, unite with each other, or change into each other. As a rule, however, they exhibit no new powers. But given a happy concurrence of qualities, say a certain union of heat and cold, and a new power does become manifest: the power of life. Thus, in a sense, Aristotle does envisage the spontaneous generation of life; and he knows, roughly, what he means by life. The living thing can go through far more changes than the non-living, while yet remaining recognizably the same thing. For example, it shows in itself a greater advance to richness and also a decline, it uses other things to foster this advance, and it sends out fresh things, like itself, but independent of itself: in short, it grows, decays, feeds itself, and propagates its kind.[19]
As I understand Aristotle, for him there is not an entire and absolute difference between ordinary matter and living things, and yet there is a real difference, and one not to be explained away, for there is a new manifestation of active energy. And if we consider life of more value than mere motion, then we are right in saying there is a higher energy. The quality of growth is a quality which could not be deduced from the quality of warmth or from the quality of mere movement in space, and yet all three qualities are alike in this, that they are all manifestations of an energy which is somehow inherent in things, and not merely imposed on them from without. The manifestations of life are started, in a sense, by the different movements, 'mechanical', if you like to call them so, in the rudimentary forms of matter, the elements meeting each other in space. The process of life could not have begun without such movements. But neither could it have begun if the elements, just as they appear, had been all there was. There had to be latent, that is, the possibility of a different and higher mode of action. This higher mode of action Aristotle calls a higher Form, a higher Idea. And I think it is true to him
