158 ARISTOTLE
putting it to work. But in the same person it is knowledge that is first in coming into
being; for this reason the soul is a being-at-work-staying-itself of the first kind of a nat-
ural body having life as a potency. But such a body is organized [i.e., has parts subordi-
nated to the whole as instruments of it]. (And even the parts of plants are organs, though
utterly simple ones, as the leaf is a covering for the peel and the peel for the fruit, while
the roots are analogous to the mouth, since both take in food.) So if one needs to say
what is common to every soul, it would be that it is a being-at-work-staying-itself of the
first kind of a natural, organized body. And for this reason it is not necessary to seek out
whether the soul and body are one, any more than with wax and the shape molded in it,
or generally with the material of each thing and that of which it is the material; for even
though oneand areare meant in more than one way, the governing sense of each of
them is being-at-work-staying-itself.
So what soul is has been said in general, for it is thinghood as it is unfolded in
speech, and this is what such-and-such a body keeps on being in order to be at all. It
would be as though some tool, such as an axe, were a natural body, since its being-an-
axe would be the thinghood of it, and that would be its soul; for if this were separated
from it, it would no longer be an axe, other than ambiguously. But in fact it is an axe,
since it is not of this sort of body that the soul is the meaning and the what-it-is-for-it-
to-be, but of a certain sort of natural body, one that has a source of motion and rest in
itself. But one ought to consider what has been said as applying even to the parts of such
a body. For if the eye were an animal, the soul of it would be its sight, since this is the
thinghood of an eye as it is disclosed in speech (and the eye is the material of sight); if
its sight were left out it would no longer be an eye, except ambiguously, in the same
way as a stone eye or a painted one.
Now one should take what applies to the part up to the whole living body, for
there is an analogy: as part [of perceiving] is to part [of the body], so is perceiving as a
whole to the whole perceptive body as such. And it is not the body that has lost its soul
that is in potency to be alive, but the one that has it, and the seed and fruit are in potency
to be certain sorts of bodies. So just as the act of cutting is for the axe and the act of see-
ing for the eye, so too is the waking condition a being-at-work-staying-itself, but as the
power of sight is to the eye and the capacity of the tool to the axe, so is the soul a being-
at-work-staying-itself, while the body is what has being in potency. But just as the eye-
ball and the power of sight are the eye, so here the soul and the body are the living thing.
So it is not difficult to see why the soul, or at least certain parts of it, is not separate from
the body, if the soul is of such a nature as to be divided, since for some parts of the body,
the soul is the being-at-work-staying-itself of those parts themselves. Nevertheless,
nothing prevents some parts from being separate, so long as they are not the being-at-
work* of any part of the body. But it would be difficult to see [why the soul is not sepa-
rate from the body] if the soul were the being-at-work of the body in the way that the
sailor is of the boat. But let this stand as marking off and sketching out in an outline
what concerns the soul.- Now since what is clear and more knowable by reason arises out of what is
unclear but more obvious, it is necessary to try again to go on in this way about the soul.
*<energeia>, often translated “actuality.” As our translator puts it, “Aristotle’s central thought is that
all being is being-at-work, and that anything inert would cease to be. The primary sense of the word belongs
to activities that are not motions; examples of these are seeing, knowing, and happiness, each understood as
an ongoing state that is complete at every instant.”1020413 a10412 b
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