introduction of other considerations, get much further than Aristotle. But his conclusion does represent a first step without which no evidence on a narrower experiential basis can be of much avail in shaping the conception. For nothing, within any limited type of experience, can give intelligence to shape our ideas of any entity at the base of all actual things, unless the general character of things requires that there be such an entity.
The phrase. Prime Mover, warns us that Aristotle’s thought was enmeshed in the details of an erroneous physics and an erroneous cosmology. In Aristotle’s physics special causes were required to sustain the motions of material things. These could easily be fitted into his system, provided that the general cosmic motions could be sustained. For then in relation to the general working system, each thing could be provided with its true end. Hence the necessity for a Prime Mover who sustains the motions of the spheres on which depend the adjustment of things. To-day we repudiate the Aristotelian physics and the Aristotelian cosmology, so that the exact form of the above argument manifestly fails. But if our general metaphysics is in any way similar to that outlined in the previous chapter, an analogous metaphysical problem arises which can be solved only in an analogous fashion. In the place of Aristotle’s God as Prime Mover, we require God as the Principle of Concretion. This position can be substantiated only by the discussion of the general implication of the course of actual occasions, — that is to say, of the process of realisation.
We conceive actuality as in essential relation to an
