Overview

To Aristotle, there is no higher moment of Natural Philosophy than the study of the Soul. In Book One, we get an overview of the historical thought about the soul. The three principles of the soul handed down to us historically are that (a) it is the source of movement and (b) sensation, and that (c) it is composed of elements. Aristotle refutes (a) and (c) in turn, and we seem to be left in the position of “starting over”.

In Book Two, we do in fact start over, trying to understand the Soul phenomenologically. We find that the soul has certain faculties: the nutritive, the appetitive, the sensory, the locomotive, and the power of thinking. All besouled things have at least one of these, and some have all. The plan moving forward is to analyze each of these faculties in turn. The remainder of Book Two addresses the nutritive, appetitive, and sensory functions of the soul.

Book Three treats, in turn, (1) “common sense”, or that which allows us to discriminate between sense objects of different sensory domains, (2) the imaginitive function of the mind (the name which marks out the domain of the “knowing soul”, as opposed to the sensing soul), (3) the practical function of the mind, and (4) the motive function. At the conclusion, it is decided that the Touch is “the essential mark of [animal] life.”

  1. BOOK ONE
    1. The dignity, usefulness, and difficulty of Psychology.
      1. Knowledge of the soul is knowledge with the higest dignity. Knowledge of the soul tells us something about truth, and something about Nature, insofar as it is in some sense the principle of animal life.
      2. This knowledge, though, is nefariously difficult to attain. First, we need to know which summa genera (categories) the soul lies (is it a substance, quantum, etc). Is it potential or actual? Is it divisible? Are all souls part of one soul? Etc.
      3. Also, are all the dispositions of soul actually dispositions of the soul/body complex?
        1. It seems they are: passion, joy, fear, pity, courage, loving and hating, etc. are all produced in varying intensities that are not strictly correlative to the stimuli; apparently, this entails that these dispositions rely in some sense on an already-existing bodily state, at least in degree.
        2. Even clearer, we sometimes find ourselves, in the absence of any external cause of terror, feeling terrified.
      4. This seems to entail that soul-based dispositions are definable materially.
    2. The opinions of early thinkers about the soul.
      1. Historically, movement and sensation have been thought to be the reliable indicators of a soul-infused object.
        1. Many philosophers have viewed soul as the condition of possibility for all movement, or as the self-moving thing.
          1. Also, many of these philosophers have thought that soul and mind were the same thing.
        2. Other philosophers took perception itself to be the most characteristic attribute of the soul.
        3. Generally, those in both camps define the soul as constructed by an element (e.g. fire) or elements.
    3. Refutation of the view which assigns movement to the soul.
      1. Not only is (1.b.i.i) impossible, but it is in fact impossible that movement be an attribute of the soul.
      2. Things can be moved in two ways: (a) indirectly - by something else, or (b) directly - by its own power.
      3. Further, there are four species of movement: (a) locomotion, (b) alteration, (c) diminution, and (d) growth.
      4. If the soul is self-moving, its “moving-itself-ness” must be essential to it, and if so, because all (1.c.iii.a-d) above require place, the soul requires place.
      5. Since the soul moves the body, and the body moves by locomotion, it would seem to entail that the soul is itself moveable in space:
        1. If it is self-moving, it seems that it could aka. leave the body, which would imply the possibility of the resurrection of animals from the dead.
        2. It seems most likely that if the soul is at best incidentally moved by the body.
      6. In the sense where we think of mind and soul as the same thing, we realize that if infinite movement were coextensive with the soul, the mind would be infinitely moving (circularly, as Plato wants it in the Timaeus), which doesn’t seem to be the case as all practical instances of thinking possess very definite limits.
      7. If we can now agree that movement is not essential to the soul, movement must be contrary to the soul’s nature.
      8. Also, all views of the soul want to join it to a body without adding any specification of the reason of their union.
    4. The soul not a harmony.
      1. Another account is that the soul is a harmony: (a) a blend or composition of contraries, and (b) the body is compounded out of contraries. This is absurd because:
        1. There are many composite parts, variously compounded.
        2. All body parts (bone, muscle, etc) are different ratios of elements, so in order for the soul to be the composition of these elements, we appear to require multiple souls/harmonies to compose a body.
        3. E.g.: Is the soul identical with the ratio of elements, or is it something “above” this? Is love the cause of any and every mixture, or only those in the right ratio? Is love this ratio itself, or something “above” it? Etc.
      2. And now we know that the soul cannot be a harmony (1.d.i) nor can it be moved in a circle (1.c.vi). Yet it seems that it can be moved incidentally, and further it can power its vehicle (the body). In no other sense can the soul be moved.
        1. Qua those who say that the soul can be angered ([self-]moved to anger), this is as inexact as saying that the soul weaves webs or builds houses.
    5. The soul not moved with non-local movement.
      1. The case of mind is different, but in order to understand the mind as properly material, we only have to make the analogy to sight; both of these men lose with age, as their material elements disintegrate.
        1. So it seems clear that a disposition of the soul is not responsible for the incapacities of old age, but one of the body.
      2. Thus, finally, it is clear that the soul cannot be moved at all, and as such, certainly cannot be self-moving.
    6. The soul not a self-moving number.
      1. This hypothesis is by far the most unreasonable one yet, as it falls prey not only to the fallacy that the soul can be moved, but also to the ontological confusion that the soul is a number.
        1. How could a unit be moved? By what agency? What sort of movement would it be?
        2. Also, 1 divided in half equals a different unit, but plants and animals, when divided, are thought to retain the same soul in each segment.
    7. The soul not composed of elements.
      1. At this point, (1.b.i.i-1.b.i.ii) are refuted. What remains is to examine 1.b.i.iii. The reason for this doctrine is that its proponents think that only like can know like (i.e. only something composed of elements can know something composed of elements, i.e. bone or man).
      2. There’s nothing to be gained by the soul being composed of elements unless there are also various formulae of proportion consummate to the “recipe” for a soul. Even worse is that the recipe would have to contain the recipes of all the objects of its knowledge, which seems very unlikely.
        1. An ugly consequence of this is that it makes mortal souls more complete than the God-soul, as the God-soul is unable of knowing strife, but the mortal soul is.
        2. Continuing with the argument forwarded in (1.g.ii), we now ask: Why not just say everything has a soul? If everything is formed out of elements, each thing must certainly /know/ one or several or all of the elements.
        3. The anti-materialism argument: Mind is the primary thing, and these elemental-souls require matter to be more primary than mind!
      3. Secondly, if the soul is (i.e.) a substance, how will it know other types of beings (qua Categories: qualia, etc.)?
      4. Continuing the argument of (1.b.i.i-1.b.i.ii), then:
        1. If you consider the soul as the source of movement, and souls as the province of animals, you aren’t accounting for animals that don’t move/locomote.
        2. Further, if you want the soul as the perceptive faculty, you have to contend with the fact that while plants live, they aren’t endowed with either locomotion or perception, and most animals have no reason.
    8. The soul not present in all things.
      1. Some thinkers say that the soul is intermingled in the whole universe, but if so:
        1. Why/by what mechanism does it in some cases form an animal and not in all cases?
        2. Both ways you can answer this question lead to a paradox.
    9. The unity of the soul.
      1. Finally, some hold that the soul is divisible. But if this is the case, what holds its parts together? Surely not the body, it seems clear that the contrary is true (when the soul departs, the body decays).
      2. This argument also falls victim to the third man argument. If some unifying agency holds the soul together, is /that/ one or multipartite? Etc.
      3. From the plants argument (1.g.iv.ii), we know then that the soul is homogenous (it doesn’t have distinct parts) and that it is divisible (i.e. the smallest bit of soul is still homogenous soul).
      4. Finally, it seems that this principle in plants is a kind of soul, since it seems to be the only principle holding plants and animals together. Therefore, while it appears that soul is /necessary/ to perception, perception does not constitute soul. Neither locomotion, needless to say.
  2. BOOK TWO
    So much for our predecessors’ views. Let’s make a completely fresh start:

    1. First definition of soul.
      1. Substance (determinate “what is”) is: (a) matter/potentiality - the stuff that makes up stuff - and (b) form/actuality/essence - that in virtue of which ‘this’ is ‘this’ as such, and (c) the combination of both.
        1. Of form/actuality, there are two grades, e.g. knowledge and the exercise of knowledge.
      2. Bodies are substances in the sense of (2.a.i.c: a composite) above.
      3. But, the body cannot be soul; the body is the subject or matter to the soul’s form. But form is actuality, and thus the soul is the actuality of a body thus characterized.
        1. In the first sense: of knowledge possessed; as waking corresponds to actual knowing (the exercise of knowledge).
        2. In the second sense: of knowledge possessed but not employed; sleeping.
      4. Thus the soul is the “first grade of actuality of a natural organized body.” Hence the soul/body distinction is meaningless: It is like asking whether the wax and the shape of the wax are one.
      5. More simply, soul is the essence of the thing. But this still requires having in itself the power to move itself.
        1. This power (”soulness”) is first-grade (essential) actuality, contra (2.a.iii.i), which is more second-grade (instrumental) actuality - more like the actuality of the axe.
      6. So, as the pupil + the power of sight constitutes the eye, so the body + soul constitutes the animal.
        1. From which it follows that (at least parts, if it has parts, of) the soul is inseparable from the body.
        2. Which leaves us with the problem of whether the soul is the actuality of the body in the sense that the sailor is the actuality (i.e. actuator) of the ship.
    2. Second definition of soul.
      1. Let’s now see what emerges from (a): we’ve discovered the conclusion of the syllogism, but we need to prove the ground (middle term).
      2. We know that what has soul differs from what doesn’t insofar as it displays life.
        1. Displaying life seems to be constituted by the power of self-nutrition.
        2. Displaying animal life seems to be constituted by sensation, namely touch.
      3. We have no evidence as yet about mind, which seems to be a very different kind of soul (eternal vs. perishable: “it alone is capable of existence in isolation from all other psychic powers.”).
      4. However, we are quite sure at this point that the soul (a) cannot be without a body (it is the actuality of the body), and (b) cannot be a body (it is something relative to a body), so:
        1. We can say that soul is an formulable essence of something that possesses a potentiality of being “besouled”.
        2. This leaves us needing a specification of what kind of body can be “besouled”.
    3. The faculties of the soul.
      1. We’ve mentioned the following powers of the soul: the nutritive, the appetitive, the sensory, the locomotive, and the power of thinking. All besouled things have at least one of these, and some have all.
        1. Certain of these entail others; i.e. all animals with the sense of touch have the appetitive power.
        2. There is no soul apart from the forms so enumerated. Hence, the desire for a general definition is destined to fail (qua. “figure”), and we must handle the problem on a species-level.
      2. So, the best way to define the soul is to give a definition of each of its forms.
    4. The nutritive faculty.
      1. Since nutrition (and reproduction, which he considers inseparable from the former) is the only factor common to all souls, we start there.
        1. Reproduction is an attempt to reach the divine, by the creation of an unbroken current of the same specific life flowing through a discontinuous series of individual beings united by descent.
      2. The soul is the cause of the body in three senses: It is (a) the source or origin of movement, (b) the end, (c) the essence of the whole living body.
        1. (c) is obvious since the essence of anything is the ground of its being, and in the case of living things, the ground of their being is life, and the soul is the source of life (by definition).
        2. (b) is manifest since Nature acts in a purposive way.
        3. (a) is maintained insofar as (i) qualitative change occurs via sensation, and (ii) quantitative change (growth and decay) occur via self-nutrition. Hence, all change comes from the soul.
      3. An account of food: The consumer of food transforms the food into itself.
        1. Historically, some thinkers have said that food is contrary to the thing which consumes it.
        2. Others have said that like is consumed by like.
        3. Aristotle will resolve this difference by saying that the former is undigested food, which is transformed into the latter by digestion.
      4. So, we can say that what is fed is fed because of the soul.
      5. The process of nutruition involves three factors: (a) what is fed, (b) that with which it is fed, and (c) what does the feeding.
        1. (c) is the first - earliest and most indispensible kind of - soul.
        2. (a) is the body, besouled.
        3. (b) is the food.
      6. But remember (qua 2.d.i.i) that the end of all this is reproduction, so the first soul is the reproductive soul, powered by a faculty of nutrition.
    5. Sense-perception
      1. Sensation in general relies on something outside itself as its object.
      2. Why do we not perceive the senses themselves as well as the external objects of sense?
        1. Or, why do the senses require objects since they are presumably made of the same elements as their objects?
        2. Sensitivity, then, must be a kind of potentiality (like, say, flammability).
      3. “Perceive” above as (a) the ability to perceive (a closed eye) and (b) actually seeing (something).
        1. Thus, sense must have both potential and actual senses too.
        2. Further, there are three “potentialities” here: The potential (e.g.) of a wild chimpanzee to communicate something linguistically, and the potential of someone sho speaks English to communicate something something linguistically, and someone actually saying something.
      4. Being “acted upon” by some (sense object, e.g.) also has two senses: (a) the extinction of two contraries (e.g. of food via digestion), or (b) the transformation of something like from potentiality to actuality by an actual thing (e.g. learning).
        1. The potentiality of (2.e.iv.b) also has two senses, e.g.:
          1. The way we might say that a boy may become a general.
          2. The way we say the same of an adult.
    6. The different kinds of sensible object
      1. There are three kinds of objects of sense:
        1. What is perceptible by a single sense (a “special object”: color, sound, flavor).
        2. What is perceptible by any and all senses (”common sensibles”: movement, number, figure).
        3. An “incidental object”: Something like “the son of Diares”, whose essence/concept is incidental to its perceptible qualities (i.e. a white object).
        4. (2.f.i.i-ii) are directly perceptible, (2.f.i.iii) is indirectly perceptible (or it relies on another facultly of perceptiblility -Pt).
    7. Sight and its object
      1. The object of sight is visible, which is to say that it is (a) color and (b) a certain kind of object that can be described in words but which has no single name (see below).
      2. If we want to understand color, we have to understand light:
        1. Light is the proper color of what is transparent (e.g. air, water), and exists wherever the potentially transparent is excited to actuality (by fire, he says; elements, we are thinking he means).
        2. Reflective things are bracketed here. Suffice it that what is seen in light is always color.
      3. The mechanics of seeing are like this: Color sets the air into movement, which comes into contact with the sense organ, which it sets in movement.
        1. This mechanism can be abstracted to describe the function of all senses: Sense object -> Medium -> Sense organ.
          1. The apparent difference between sight/smell/sound and touch/taste will be handled later.
    8. Hearing and its object
      1. Two kinds of sounds, actual (e.g. music) and potential (e.g. an instrument). Note that this distinction will be repeated for all senses, but not further noted.
        1. Actual sound requires two bodies with potential sound and a space between them.
      2. Voice is a kind of sound characteristic of what has soul in it.
        1. Voice is a sound with meaning.
    9. Smell and its object
      1. The reason why smell is more elusive to us than (2.g) and (2.h) is because our sense of smell is inferior (to our others, to that of other animals).
        1. This is evidenced by the fact that smell does not seem to give us clear knowledge (qua sight, hearing), but instead only the confused sensations of pleasure or pain.
        2. This is parallel to our sense of taste; the exception is that taste is more discriminating, since it involves touch.
        3. So much is our sense of smell confused, that we often describe smells out of a felt likeness to tastes (aka. we describe honey as smelling sweet because it tastes sweet and we end up associating that with smell, in absense of a “real” vocabulary of smells).
    10. Taste and its object
      1. Taste is directly reliant on touch. The thing that touches the tongue must be liquid/dissovable.
      2. The organ of taste must be able to become assimilated to its objects, so it must be a non-liquid capable of “liquidizing” - aka. becoming moist.
      3. Similar to the categories of smell, tastes are either (a) bitter/saline or (b) sweet/succulent. From (2.k.iii.a-b): Pungent, harsh, astringent, and acid.
    11. Touch and its object
      1. It is a problem whether touch is one sense or a group of senses.
      2. There is another problem about what the organ of touch is (the flesh? or is that the medium of touch, the real organ situated further inward?).
      3. A third problem is whether all senses are taking place in the same way (e.g. through touching the medium). Aristotle will say yes to this one.
        1. Basically, if you place a white thing on the eye, you can’t see the whiteness, etc. Hence, senses need media. Hence, the flesh is not the organ of touch, but rather the medium.
      4. Finally, we can’t percieve a mean of hotness and coldness (or, e.g. blackness and whiteness), we rather only percieve hotness exclusively or vice versa.
        1. This seems to imply that sense itself is a ‘mean’ between any two opposite qualities of objects as determined by that sense.
    12. General characteristics of the external senses
      1. Overview: What is a sense?
        1. A sense is that which has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter.
        2. An organ of sense is that in which (2.m.i) is seated.
      2. An explanation of plants, then, is that they don’t contain within themselves the means of contrary qualities.
      3. Finally, as to the question of whether objects of sense can affect bodies without the proper sense organs:
        1. Light, sounds, smells leave bodies quite unaffected, what does affect bodies is the media (the air, e.g.) of these objects of sense.
        2. For example, the visual effect of lightning doesn’t split a tree trunk, the air affected by the phenomenon does.
        3. Senses, then, are just observers of the resultant changes in the media of sense-object transmission.
  3. BOOK THREE
    1. The number of external senses
      1. How can we be sure that there are just five senses?
        1. Touch covers any potential comers viz. sensation by contact, and thus all other senses are handled through a medium.
        2. Assume that for every sense there needs to be a sense organ, which is made of the same element as the medium through which the object of sense passes (eyes of water, ears of air, noses of one or the other).
        3. Given that no sense organs seem to be made of earth alone (except maybe those under the domain of touch), and further either none or all of them contain fire, then all the possible sense organs are possessed by well-formed animals.
        4. This argument assumes that the four elements are those of the world, and there is no other.
      2. The common sensibles (2.f.i.ii) are percieved by two qualities contemperanously. If there were special sense organs, our perception of the common qualities would always be incidental (aka. we couldn’t tie whiteness to Cleon’s son perceptibly).
        1. We do posess a general sensibility which enables us to perceive them directly.
        2. This “percipient sense” is what allows us to tie two individual sense-data (yellow, bitter) together in a single perception.
        3. That we have many senses instead of just one (a) provides determinacy, and (b) reveals the distinction between common sensibles and special sensibles.
    2. Common sense
      1. The question of whether a sense can be self perceptive (aka. is it by sight that we know we are seeing?)
        1. The appeal to hallucination: Sight (or the eye) itself must be colored, since it can experience color/vision without the material of the thing (think of a red apple).
      2. Further, like a thing may have a sound without (actively being) sounding, so a thing may have hearing without (actively) hearing.
        1. That said, actively sounding and hearing are the same event: “Since the actualities of the sensible object and of the sensitive faculty are one actuality in spite of the difference between their modes of being, actual hearing and actual sounding appear and disappear from existence at one and the same moment, while as potentialities one of them may exist without the other.”
        2. Hence, the relationship of actual sensation (between sensor/sensed) is a ratio: Objects of sense are pleasant in sensible extremes, and painful in excess.
      3. But how do we discriminate between sense objects of different sensory domains (aka. whiteness and sweetness)?
        1. There has to be some faculty that has access to the experience of both whiteness and sweetness.
        2. This has to be done simultaneously.
    3. Thinking, perceiving, and imagining distinguished.
      1. Remember our two faculties of the soul, (1) local movement and (2) thinking/perciving/discriminating.
      2. Thinking is akin to perceiving, for in both the soul discriminates and is cognizant of something that is.
        1. Thinking has - historically - even been identified with perceiving, although this doesn’t seem to account for the possibility of error. Unless:
          1. Whatever seems is true (there is no truth/appearance distinction).
          2. Error is contact with the unlike (although it is also widely accepted that only like can know like, and likewise error).
        2. Hence, perceiving and practical thinking are not identical. (Just think: the former is universal to all animals, the latter quite rare.)
        3. Further, speculative thinking (imagining) is also different from perceiving.
          1. In discrusive/practical thinking we are called to form judgements, in which we are constrained by truth and falsity, contra the more “free” terrain of imagination.
          2. Also, we can imagine things that will stimulate us similarly to perceptions, but which don’t endanger us.
        4. Hence, thinking is divided into thinking as judgement (3.e-h) and thinking as imagination (3.d).
    4. Imagination
      1. Imagination is not sense:
        1. Sense is either a faculty or an activity (sight, seeing), imagination takes place in the absense of both (e.g.: in dreams).
          1. Visions appear to us even when our eyes are shut.
        2. Sense is always present in animals; imagination is not.
        3. Sensations are always true; imaginations are for the most part false. (Saying that we “imagined it to be a man” is an indicator of its sense-falseness.)
      2. What is it?
        1. It’s not knowledge or intelligence, for it can be false, while the former cannot.
        2. It is not opinion, because opinion involves belief (which entails conviction, which entails reason).
          1. Hence imagination cannot be opinion in any way combined with or mediated by sensation.
        3. But, imagination is still held to be moved by sensation, and hence impossible without sensation.
          1. This movement must be necessarily (a) incapable of existing without sensation, and (b) incapable of existing except when we perceive.
          2. That in which it is found may contain phenomena both active and passive.
          3. It (the movement which spurs imagination) may be either true or false.
        4. The reason for (2.d.ii.iii) is that imagination relies on combined objects of common sense, so
          1. While single-sense-objects cannot be false (aka. whiteness is white).
          2. Second- (what is white is this or that) and third- (attributes of second-: movement, magnitude) degree objects of sense may be subject to sense-illusion.
        5. Hence, imagination must be a movement resulting from an actual exercise of sense.
    5. Passive mind.
      1. Now to turn to the thinking and knowing part of the soul. What differentiates this part, and how does thinking take place?
      2. Mind must be related to what is thinkable as sense is to what is sensible. Since (a) everything is thinkable, then, and if (b) like can only think like, and (c) the soul admits no admixture, then mind, “before it thinks, [is] not actually any real thing.”
        1. Hence, it cannot be blended with the body, lest it acquire some quality.
        2. Hence, the intellective soul is a place of potential forms.
      3. Extreme experiences of mind (very clear thoughts) seem to have the opposite effect of extreme experiences of sense (very loud music); they make the forthcoming thought more acute, and not confused.
        1. Once the mind has taken the shapes of all its objects of knowledge, it moves from the first kind of passivity to the second (cf. 2.e.iv.i): the mind is then able to think itself.
        2. Insofar as the realities the mind knows are capable of being separated from their matter (straightness vs. something straight), so also are the powers of the mind. (I wish I had an example here.)
      4. A possible objection: If mind is thinkable per se and what is thinkable is like the thinking thing, then either (a) mind belongs to everything, or (b) mind will contain some element common to all thinkable things.
        1. Qua (3.e.iv.a): Mind is /potentially/ like whatever is thinkable.
        2. Qua (3.e.iv.b): Mind is thinkable in exactly the same way its objects are: it is the potentiality of immanence as such that allows all things (speculative and materiality alike) to be thinkable. And what is mind if not the potentiality of immanence?
    6. Active mind.
      1. Since in every class of things we have (1) a matter which is potentially all the particulars included in the class, and (2) a cause which is productive in the sense that it makes them all (e.g. 2:1 as art:material).
        1. In (3.e.ii) above, we described mind as something which takes the form of its objects.
        2. In addition to this, we need a positive state which “makes” things (like light makes colors).
      2. While potential knowledge is prior in time in a subject to actual knowledge, not so in the universe.
        1. “When mind is set free from its present conditions” (when is this?) “it appears as just what it is…this alone is immortal and eternal…and without it nothing thinks.”
        2. What on earth is that referring to? I have to guess that its point at the sort of disembodied cosmological mind - mind as such - that is God. Or maybe our individual minds join up to the universal mind at death? All our souls are part of one big soul-mass, which distributes itself amongst life?
        3. Note: In the “Generation of Animals” Aristotle speaks of an intellect that enters “from without” (GA 736 b 27).
    7. The double operation of mind.
      1. Falsehood always involves a synthesis of two objects of mind (single sense-perceptions are always true).
        1. The unifying/synthesizing faculty is mind.
      2. The mind is capable of identifying simple (indivisible objects) as well.
      3. This unification of (3.g.i) can occur with actually or theoretically unified/divided objects (note that dividing the unified and unifying the divided work the same way here):
        1. Actual: The mind can divide an actually undivided length (in a similarly undivided time): In this instance, it can (e.g.) divide it in half (the object has no parts until it is divided), which also divides the time into the time in which there are two and the time in which there is one.
        2. The object of thought and the time in which it is thought here are only incidentally divisible. They also contain some indivisible unity, which gives us the time and the length as such.
        3. The best thing I can come up with here is that to have a simple line (or two), you have to have a simple time. As soon as you complicate the line (by, say, splitting it) you need complex time or the relation of contraries (one and two lines).
      4. In overview: That which cognizes must be characterized actually by one and potentially by the other of two contraries. (E.g. the cognition of evil or black.)
    8. The practical mind, and the difference between it and the contemplative.
      1. Here we get some light on (3.f.ii.ii): “…in the universe [potential knowledge] has no priority even in time; for all things that come into being arise from what actually is.”
        1. So, simple objects of sense (2.f.i.i) and knowledge (3.g.ii) - perceptions - are like bare asserting or knowing.
        2. Complex objects of sense and knowledge (movement, pain) are arrived at by negation or “quasi-affirmation” (qua 3.g.iii).
      2. The thinking soul uses images as the contents of perception. (They are like, e.g. the air that modifies the pupil for the soul: (perception-objects -> images -> soul).
      3. Let the single-sense faculties unified by (3.b.iii) be C and D where A and B are their sense objects.
        1. A:B :: C:D (aka. sweet:hot :: taste:touch)
        2. This is ostensibly how the thinking soul uses images to create judgements, which in turn lead to actions (pursuit/avoidance).
        3. Note that this is a faculty exclusive to the speculative mind. (See 3.c.ii-iii)
    9. Comparison of mind with sense and with imagination.
      1. In summary, the soul is in a way all existing things:
        1. Sensation is in a way what is sensible
        2. Kowledge is in a way what is knowable
        3. Knowable and sensible things are exhaustive of all things.
        4. The question now is: What is the way in which this is true?
      2. Within the soul, the faculties of knowledge and sensation are potentially the knowable/sensible.
        1. These potentialities must be either the things themselves or their forms.
        2. The former is impossible (viz. the stone). It must be the forms.
        3. Hence, the soul is analogous to the hand: As the hand is a tool of tools (a tool for using tools), the mind is the form of forms and sense the form of sensible things.
      3. Hence (how?):
        1. No one can learn anything in the absence of sense.
        2. When the mind is actively aware of anything, it is so through an image.
      4. Imagination is different from assertion and denial, as the latter require a synthesis of concepts.
        1. In what way do concepts differ from images?
        2. Must we not say (he asks) that concepts are not images, though they necessarily involve them?
    10. Problems about the motive faculty.
      1. Remember (again, from [3.c.i]) our two faculties of the soul, (1) originating local movement and (2) discriminating.
      2. Now, what is it in the soul that originates movement? Is it a part or the whole thing?
        1. If we have to break up the soul we’re going to stick with the old schema (2.c.i):
          1. The Nutritive
          2. The Sensitive
          3. The Imaginative/Practical (3.c.ii-iii, 3.h.iii.iii)
          4. The Appetitive
      3. Let’s start with a restricted subset of movement: What generates forward movement in the animal?
        1. It seems like the appetitive and the imaginative faculties would motivate the animal to move.
        2. It can’t be the nutritive faculty (since plants share that), nor the sensitive (for there are animals with sensation which don’t move).
        3. It can’t be the calculative/specutlative mind, for this doesn’t think things which are practical.
        4. In short, it is desire that is moves us.
        5. But we observe that something else is required to produce action in accordance with knowledge, as appetite is “too incompetent to account fully for movement.”
    11. The cause of the movement of living things.
      1. In short, it appears that the appetites and the imaginative part of mind (shared by all animals, that is, the non-rational part) motivate all movement.
      2. The practical mind is stimulated by the object of an appetite. Both practical mind and appetite are end-oriented.
        1. This ultimately means that when the imaginative/practical facility originates movement, it does so on behalf of an appetite.
        2. Thus the origin of movement is the appetitive faculty of the soul.
      3. All movement involves (a) that which originates the movement, (b) that by means of which it originates it, and (c) that which is moved (the animal).
        1. (a) may mean either something which is itself unmoved (the realizable good) or else something which is at once moves and is moved (the faculty of appetite).
      4. To sum up, insofar as an animal is capable of appetite, it is capable of self-movement. It is not capable of appetite without possessing imagination (either calculative or sensitive).
      5. Three modes of movement are possible:
      1. That in which the appetites overpower wish (gluttony)
      2. That in which the wish overpowers the appetites (restraint)
      3. That in which appetites overpower appetites (the dog drops the bone in the water)
    12. The faculty of knowing is never moved but remains at rest.
      1. The domain of knowledge is the universal, not the particular.
  4. The mutual relations of the faculties of the soul, and their fitness for the conditions of life.
    1. To wrap up: All besouled things have the nutritive faculty.
    2. All animals have the sensitive faculty.
      1. Further, animals require touch specifically in order to survive (touch is a condition of being embodied).
      2. That is why taste is a sort of touch; it is the sense of the tangible and nutritious.
    3. It is clear that the body of an animal cannot consist of a single element, as it requires touch.
      1. The element of touch is earth, so earth-constitution is a requirement for embodiment.
      2. Additionally, touch must be composed of other elements, since it is capable of perceiving (e.g. hot/cold).
      3. This will also explain why when an excess of sensation is presented to any other sense (very loud noise, etc.) it simply destroys the specific sense-organ, but when an excess of touch (burning, etc) is given, it destroys the animal.
    4. Touch is “the essential mark of [animal] life.”