change of all things is sweet, as the poet has it, because of a certain defect.”[1]
The significance of this passage has been generally ignored, and the commentators say as little about it as they conveniently can. Thus, of the two latest editors of the Ethics, Prof. Stewart accuses Aristotle of waxing poetical, while Prof. Burnet finds nothing to say about it at all; and as this has occurred after I had done my utmost to call attention to it,[2] I think I may assume that still further comment is needed to help modern minds to grasp the beauty and importance of Aristotle’s thought.
It follows from the above that the perfect or divine life is one of unceasing and unchanging activity, which is eternal consciousness of supreme happiness. And yet nothing happens in it. It is eternal, not in the illusory sense in which geometrical triangles and epistemological monstrosities (like e.g., Green’s Eternal Self-Consciousness) are put out of Time by a trick of abstraction, but because it can be shown to have a positive nature, which precludes the conditions out of which time-consciousness arises. For, as Aristotle was well aware, Time is a creature of Motion, it depends on the motions whereby alone it can be measured; it is κινήσεως ἀριθμός. If then κίνησις arises out of the imperfection of an ἐνέργεια, the perfecting of an ἐνέργεια will necessarily involve the disappearance of Time, together with that of motion. Or, as I have elsewhere expressed it,[3] Time is the measure of the impermanence of the imperfect, and the perfecting of the time-consciousness would carry us out of Time into Eternity. In other words, the conception of Ἐνέργεια Ἀκινησίας is a scientific formulation of the popular theological conceptions of Heaven and Eternity.
Of course all this sounds unfamiliar and fantastical and is not quite easy to grasp—if it had been the notions of Heaven and Eternity would hardly have become targets for
- ↑ Cf. also Metaph., Λ. 7, 1072 b 16.
- ↑ Riddles of the Sphinx, p. 443.
- ↑ Ibid. ch. ix., 11.
