Hence the rightness of the view that the soul cannot be without a
body, while it csnnot he a body; it is not a body but something
relative to a body. That is why it is in a body, and a body of a
definite kind. It was a mistake, therefore, to do as former thinkers
did, merely to fit it into a body without adding a definite
specification of the kind or character of that body. Reflection
confirms the observed fact; the actuality of any given thing can
only be realized in what is already potentially that thing, i.e. in
a matter of its own appropriate to it. From all this it follows that
soul is an actuality or formulable essence of something that possesses
a potentiality of being besouled.
3
Of the psychic powers above enumerated some kinds of living
things, as we have said, possess all, some less than all, others one
only. Those we have mentioned are the nutritive, the appetitive, the
sensory, the locomotive, and the power of thinking. Plants have none
but the first, the nutritive, while another order of living things has
this plus the sensory. If any order of living things has the
sensory, it must also have the appetitive; for appetite is the genus
of which desire, passion, and wish are the species; now all animals
have one sense at least, viz. touch, and whatever has a sense has
the capacity for pleasure and pain and therefore has pleasant and
painful objects present to it, and wherever these are present, there
is desire, for desire is just appetition of what is pleasant.
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