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: this is exactly what happens with mind.
Pages:
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107