TWO:We must also observe that the parallel drawn by Sir A. Grant between the theology of Aristotle and that of John Stuart Mill is singularly unfortunate. It is in the first place incorrect to say that Mill represented God as benevolent but352 not omnipotent. He only suggested the idea as less inconsistent with facts than other forms of theism.250 In the next place, Aristotles God was almost exactly the reverse of this. He possesses infinite power, but no benevolence at all. He has nothing to do with the internal arrangements of the world, either as creator or as providence. He is, in fact, an egoist of the most transcendent kind, who does nothing but think about himself and his own perfections. Nothing could be more characteristic of the unpractical Aristotelian philosophy; nothing more repugnant to the eager English reformer, the pupil of Bentham and of Plato. And, thirdly, Sir A. Grant takes what is not the God of Aristotles system at all, but a mere abstraction, the immanent reason of Nature, the Form which can never quite conquer Matter, and places it on the same line with a God who, however hypothetical, is nothing if not a person distinct from the world; while, as if to bewilder the unfortunate English reader still further, he adds, in the very next sentence, that the great defect in Aristotles conception of God is the denial that God can be a moral Being.251"And what is the news in The Netherlands about the war?"
TWO:He sculled back to get under the shading, up-tilted wing of the seaplane, studying what he saw of its half submerged after place.
