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ON THE SOUL 45
Observation of the sense-organs and their employment reveals a distinction
between the impassibility of the sensitive and that of the intellective
faculty. After strong stimulation of a sense we are less able to exercise
it than before, as e.g. in the case of a loud sound we cannot hear
easily immediately after, or in the case of a bright colour or a powerful
odour we cannot see or smell, but in the case of mind thought about
an object that is highly intelligible renders it more and not less
able afterwards to think objects that are less intelligible: the reason
is that while the faculty of sensation is dependent upon the body,
mind is separable from it.
Once the mind has become each set of its possible objects, as a man
of science has, when this phrase is used of one who is actually a
man of science (this happens when he is now able to exercise the power
on his own initiative), its condition is still one of potentiality,
but in a different sense from the potentiality which preceded the
acquisition of knowledge by learning or discovery: the mind too is
then able to think itself.
Since we can distinguish between a spatial magnitude and what it is
to be such, and between water and what it is to be water, and so in
many other cases (though not in all; for in certain cases the thing
and its form are identical), flesh and what it is to be flesh are
discriminated either by different faculties, or by the same faculty
in two different states: for flesh necessarily involves matter and
is like what is snub-nosed, a this in a this. Now it is by means of
the sensitive faculty that we discriminate the hot and the cold, i.e.
the factors which combined in a certain ratio constitute flesh: the
essential character of flesh is apprehended by something different
either wholly separate from the sensitive faculty or related to it
as a bent line to the same line when it has been straightened out.
Again in the case of abstract objects what is straight is analogous
to what is snub-nosed; for it necessarily implies a continuum as its
matter: its constitutive essence is different, if we may distinguish
between straightness and what is straight: let us take it to be two-ness.
It must be apprehended, therefore, by a different power or by the
same power in a different state. To sum up, in so far as the realities
it knows are capable of being separated from their matter, so it is
also with the powers of mind.
The problem might be suggested: if thinking is a passive affection,
then if mind is simple and impassible and has nothing in common with
anything else, as Anaxagoras says, how can it come to think at all?
For interaction between two factors is held to require a precedent
community of nature between the factors. Again it might be asked,
is mind a possible object of thought to itself? For if mind is thinkable
per se and what is thinkable is in kind one and the same, then either
(a) mind will belong to everything, or (b) mind will contain some
element common to it with all other realities which makes them all
thinkable.
(1) Have not we already disposed of the difficulty about interaction
involving a common element, when we said that mind is in a sense potentially
whatever is thinkable, though actually it is nothing until it has
thought? What it thinks must be in it just as characters may be said
to be on a writingtablet on which as yet nothing actually stands written:
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ON THE SOUL 46
this is exactly what happens with mind.
(Mind is itself thinkable in exactly the same way as its objects are.
For (a) in the case of objects which involve no matter, what thinks
and what is thought are identical; for speculative knowledge and its
object are identical. (Why mind is not always thinking we must consider
later., b) In the case of those which contain matter each of the
objects of thought is only potentially present. It follows that while
they will not have mind in them (for mind is a potentiality of them
only in so far as they are capable of being disengaged from matter)
mind may yet be thinkable.
Part 5
Since in every class of things, as in nature as a whole, we find two
factors involved, (1) a matter which is potentially all the particulars
included in the class, (2) a cause which is productive in the sense
that it makes them all (the latter standing to the former, as e.g.
an art to its material), these distinct elements must likewise be
found within the soul.
And in fact mind as we have described it is what it is what it is
by virtue of becoming all things, while there is another which is
what it is by virtue of making all things: this is a sort of positive
state like light; for in a sense light makes potential colours into
actual colours.
Mind in this sense of it is separable, impassible, unmixed, since
it is in its essential nature activity (for always the active is superior
to the passive factor, the originating force to the matter which it
forms).
Actual knowledge is identical with its object: in the individual,
potential knowledge is in time prior to actual knowledge, but in the
universe as a whole it is not prior even in time. Mind is not at one
time knowing and at another not. When mind is set free from its present
conditions it appears as just what it is and nothing more: this alone
is immortal and eternal (we do not, however, remember its former activity
because, while mind in this sense is impassible, mind as passive is
destructible), and without it nothing thinks.
Part 6
The thinking then of the simple objects of thought is found in those
cases where falsehood is impossible: where the alternative of true
or false applies, there we always find a putting together of objects
of thought in a quasi-unity. As Empedocles said that 'where heads
of many a creature sprouted without necks' they afterwards by Love's [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]