Aristotle

Aristotle (384-322 BCE) was a Greek philosopher born in Stagira, on the northern coast of the Aegean. At seventeen he entered Plato’s Academy in Athens, where he studied and taught for some twenty years until Plato’s death.

He later tutored the young Alexander the Great in Macedon and, returning to Athens, founded his own school, the Lyceum. His surviving works — lecture notes more than polished books — range across logic, physics, biology, ethics, politics, rhetoric, and metaphysics, and they shaped the structure of Western learning for two thousand years.

Though he is foundational in his own right, his metaphysics and psychology were transmitted to later mind-power currents largely through the Neoplatonic and medieval philosophers who absorbed and reinterpreted him. For the mind-power lineage, Aristotle matters because of how he located mind and form within the order of being.

Against his teacher Plato, he held that form is not a separate ideal realm but the actualising principle within things themselves. His paired concepts of potentiality and actuality (and the related entelechy, a thing’s having-its-end-within-itself) describe reality as an unfolding from the latent toward the realised.

In De Anima he defined the soul as the “first actuality” or first entelechy of a living body — the form that makes a body alive. And in the Metaphysics he reasoned to an Unmoved Mover, pure actuality and pure thought “thinking itself,” toward which all things are drawn.

This vision of mind (nous) as the highest, self-sustaining reality became a durable ancestor of later doctrines of a Universal Mind behind the cosmos.