no matter how plentifully, on barren rocks, who is to blame that it does not spring up and bear fruit?

As to fidelity, while the close relationship of friends endures, it is easy to be true. But let a strain come and our principles are tested. If a friend falls away from one's esteem and respect, and all efforts to recall him prove useless, what then? It is sometimes the highest office of friendship to end it. If a man palters with his own soul, shall his friend palter with it also? Shall he not rather uphold the soul, having faith in its survival of this degradation, and refuse to recognize the evil mask as the true man?" You are as though dead to me," are bitter words to say, but they may be the precursor of resurrection; the reviving trumpet-call to one indeed dead in trespasses and sins. Then how gladly will the grave-clothes be stripped off, and the man clothed in rich raiment and seated at the friend's right hand or held in his close embrace!

Just in which way friendship can be best served, howeverwhether by withdrawal or ceaseless endeavor to reform-is a question only the friend can decide. One must have great faith in the power affection gives him to say to another involved in sin, "I will come and take you out." For if he fails and still tries to maintain the attitude of friendship he confirms the man in his evil. Forgiveness to anything less than heartfelt repentance evidenced by action is encouragement of sin. If a man belies his own sense of right until it ceases to have any influence over his acts, and his intimates, becoming aware of his wrong-doing, put up with him as he does with himself, not demanding amendment of life as a condition of continued friendship, they have done what they can to harden his heart. "It is not so bad after all," he tells himself. "My friends know it and yet are my friends all the same."

Such persons have much to answer for. The world reflects the image a man casts therein; but if the mirror is defective he gets a distorted view of himself and his judgment cannot help but err. It is of vital importance to everybody what others think of him, for each one is dependent on his fellows and each is responsible for his relations to others.

Let us then be not too ready to drop our friends; let us do so only when we must. Let us remember that hope is a virtue as

well as faith and charity, and give him not only one opportunity but many to reinstate himself. Peter should be a great comfort to all of us, because he proved how repentance and trust can redeem the man. Two months after he had denied Christ thrice he stood on the temple steps and proclaimed him to the world. But we can hardly look for a quick Peter-like conversion in our faithless friend; there is not the merit in us to create it; let us then give him time, give him all the time there is, which is eternity, and in some part of it our trust will be justified.

Strome's friend gave utterance to an expression of the purest unselfishness and his cry is echoed down the ages. "Would I had died for thee, Absolom, my son!" And this is what the son of man and of God did. Vicarious life is the moving power of the universe. In God the personal and universal are united. "The strangest fact in the history of the world," says Prof. Davidson, "is the extraordinary personal love that Jesus excited in those who came in contact with him. They felt that in loving him they were loving the infinite God." This personal love was the center from which the vast circumference of Christianity, with its immeasurable superiority to all other developments in religion or culture, drew its life, and will forever. Man and God have become friends. We need not be servants unless we choose, though those "who will not ride in his chariot must drag in his chains." But we are offered the divine prerogative of friendship, and "so great a thing as friendship let us carry with what grandeur of soul we may."

ARISTOTLE'S DOCTRINE OF REASON.

BY W. T. HARRIS.

There are two points of view from which the human mind may contemplate the world. The first is the view of the world from the standpoint of sense-perception; the second, the view from the standpoint of the Reason or speculative insight. Sense-perception views the world as a congeries of particular things, each one an independent existence having its own being by itself, apart

from the rest of the universe and in complete repose so far as its essence is concerned. All its relations to other beings are accidental and do not concern its essence. All its activities-movements, changes-too, are accidental, and do not affect its essential

nature.

Such a view of the world is properly called materialistic. It looks upon the real and substantial as matter which fills space and is composed of hard particles, each excluding the others. Each material particle is an atom, or composed of atoms. These atoms are unchangeable and devoid of motion within themselves. This is the theory made to fit sense-perception. Sense-perception does not form a theory for itself of the universe, but reflection discovers the atomic theory as adapted to this sense-view of the world.

The reason in its view of the world, on the other hand, takes its stand on the theory of self-activity as the truly existent. According to it each thing in the universe is either a self-activity or dependent on a self-activity for all its qualities and attributes-all its properties and manifestations.

The sense

Thus our two views of the world stand in contrast. view supposes the essential to be quiescent matter without movement except what it receives from outside itself. The reason-view holds the theory that essence is self-activity, and that all quiescent matter or material things are phenomenal. By phenomenal it means dependent being-not self-contained and essential, but only the manifestation of an essence which is self-active.

To the sense-point of view nothing seems so absurd as the theory that makes self-activity the basis of existence. To the reason it is utterly impossible to hold any other theory than that of a selfactive basis for phenomena. Sense-perception does not see the necessity for self-activity; in fact, it regards self-activity as inconceivable. Our minds can imagine a thing-a quiescent being, a form, a shape, but how can we imagine or envisage an activity-a self-activity? Sense-perception knows things, and things only. But reason knows things too, and it explains them through selfactivity. Sense-perception explains things through things-great things through little things er particles of matter, and little things. through less things; and all things through least things or material atoms. Thus, to sense-perception, the important category or principle of explanation is composition or combination. Analysis and

synthesis explain the composition of each thing out of other things. But composition is an activity; it implies change and motion. How do things get compounded-how does composition happen? On this topic sense-perception has not reflected. It has no theory of composition or decomposition, nor of any sort of activity in short; for it cannot image or picture an activity, and therefore ignores it altogether, or what is the same thing, refers it to the category of accident or chance: "Things happen to get composed or joined together."

From the fact that sense-perception regards things as the only essential beings and neglects activity, it explains all movement and change as something which has an external origin to the thing. Things get moved by the action of other things. The explanation of the movement of any one thing is thus avoided: "This thing moves because other things have impinged upon it and caused it to move." But why did those things impinge upon this thing? Why did they move and cause it to move? They moved, replies sense-perception, because other things impinged upon them and caused them to move, and still other things moved and caused those things to move. And so the origin of motion is pushed off ad infinitum; it is always from beyond the things.

It would seem as though sense-perception had a vague notion that the question of the whence of motion would somehow settle itself if it could be pushed off or postponed from present consideration. It says in effect: this thing is not the origin of motion; nor is that thing, nor any other thing. All motion that we see in things is derivative: "it cometh from afar." It is not derived from things. Sense-perception by this admission has brought itself into a dilemma. For it attempted to explain the world by matter-by great things and little things-by masses and molecules. But it was obliged to use the category of composition and decomposition, a category of activity and not of matter. All the differences in the universe arise from composition and decomposition; all the appearances, all the phenomena, all the things, in short, take on their present forms through this kind of activity known to sense-perception as composition and decomposition. Hence it would seem that activity is the essential principle of explanation after all. Take away composition and you have left only atoms. But atoms are invisible. We cannot see or perceive

them except in the vast aggregates which compose things. Visibility is then the effect of activity or composition. Inasmuch as atoms are invisible they are mere fictions of thought set up by theory in order to explain sense-perception.

Sense-perception explains things by composition, and ultimate things should be fixed elements or atoms. The dilemma into which this theory has run is this: all of reality should be in the form of ultimate things; but in point of fact all of reality perceptible by the senses is a result of activity. Because activity is the origin of visible form. The senses perceive only forms and shapes, but never perceive the forms and shapes of the ultimate elements. All objects of sense-perception are then perceivable only in so far as they are products of activity. Hence it is evident that the one essential problem before the common sense of the world is to explain composition and decomposition, motion and change, activity and passivity. But this problem it has avoided and ignored. It has acted like the ostrich when pursued by the hunters: it has hidden its head in the sands (atoms) in order to avoid the pursuing questions regarding composition and activity. It has ignored the question of origin of motion, but in doing so it has been obliged to deny its origin in things. All motion comes to things from without and there is no origination of motion on the part of things. If sense-perception or reflection said anything else than this-if it admitted, for example, that motion could originate in a thing, it would admit self-activity.

Reason sees this dilemma, and sees moreover that there is no escape from the admission of self-activity. Its reasoning is this: (a) Shapes and forms, positions and relations, composition and decomposition, arise by movement and change.

(b) Change is either derived from some external source, or else it originates in self-activity within.

(c) But if it originates from some external source there must be self-activity in that external source. If it is asserted that the external source also receives its change from some other external source, reason replies effectively thus:

(d) Let this thing and all external things be devoid of selfactivity; let each thing in the universe be moved only by external causes, and it follows that all things are derivative and dependent on motion which comes from without; it follows then that motion.