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.
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