Page:Aristotle (Grant).djvu/177

 As to Matter, Aristotle called it “timber,” or “the underlying,” to indicate that it is to existence as wood is to a table, and that it is something which is implied in all existence. Nothing can exist without Matter, which is one of the four causes of the existence of everything; but, on the other hand, it may be said that Matter itself has no existence. Things can only be realised by the mind, and so come into actual existence, if they be endowed with Form; pure Matter denuded of form cannot be perceived or known, and therefore cannot be actual. Suppose we take marble as the matter or material of which a statue is composed,—if we think of the marble we attribute to it qualities—colour, brilliancy, hardness, and so on, and these qualities constitute Form, and the marble is no longer pure Matter. We have to ask, then, what is the matter "underlying" the marble? and again, if we figure to ourselves anything possessing definite qualities—as, for instance, any of the simple substances of chemistry—we at once have not only matter, but form. Matter, thus, in the theory of Aristotle, is something which must always be presupposed, and which yet always eludes us, and flies back from the region of the actual into that of the possible. Ultimate matter, or "first timber," necessarily exists as the condition of all things, but it remains as one of those possibilities which can never be realised (see above, p. 56), and thus forms the antithesis to God, the ever-actual. From all this it may be inferred that Aristotle would have considered it very unphilosophical to represent Matter, as some philosophers of the present day appear to do, as having had an