ON THESOUL(BOOKIII) 163
cases the two are the same), being flesh is distinguished either by a different potency
from the one that distinguishes flesh, or by the same one in a different relation. For
flesh is not present without material, but like a snub nose, it is this in that. So it is by
the perceptive potency that one distinguishes hot and cold, and the other things of
which flesh is a certain ratio, but it is by a different potency that one distinguishes the
being-flesh, either separate from the first or else with the two having the relation a
bent line has to itself straightened out. Among the things that have being in abstrac-
tion, straightness is in its way just like snubness, since it is combined with continuity;
but what it is for it to be, if being straight is different from what is straight, is some-
thing else—let it be twoness. Therefore one distinguishes it by a different potency, or
by one in a different relation. So in general, in whatever way things are separate from
their material, so too are the potencies that have to do with intellect separate from
one another.
But one might find it an impasse, if the intellect is simple and without attributes
and has nothing in common with anything, as Anaxagoras says, how it could think, if
thinking is a way of being acted upon (for it seems to be by virtue of something com-
mon that is present in both that one thing acts and another is acted upon), and also
whether the intellect is itself an intelligible thing. For either there would be intellect in
everything else, if it is not by virtue of something else that it is itself intelligible, but
what is intelligible is something one in kind, or else there would be something mixed in
it, which makes it intelligible like other things. As for a thing’s being acted upon in
virtue of something common, the distinction was made earlier, that the intellect isin a
certain way the intelligible things in potency, but is actively none of them before it
thinks them; it is in potency in the same way a tablet is, when nothing written is present
in it actively—this is exactly what happens with the intellect. And it is itself intelligible
in the same way its intelligible objects are, for in the case of things without material
what thinks and what is thought are the same thing, for contemplative knowing and
what is known in that way are the same thing (and one must consider the reason why
this sort of thinking is not always happening); but among things having material, each
of them is potentially something intelligible, so that there is no intellect present in them
(since intellect is a potency to be such things without their material), but there is present
in them something intelligible.
- But since in all nature one thing is the material for each kind (this is what is in
potency all the particular things of that kind), but it is something else that is the causal
and productive thing by which all of them are formed, as is the case with an art in rela-
tion to its material, it is necessary in the soul too that these distinct aspects be present;
the one sort is intellect by becoming all things, the other sort by forming all things, in
the way an active condition such as light does, for in a certain way light too makes the
colors that are in potency be at work as colors. This sort of intellect is separate, as well
as being without attributes and unmixed, since it is by its thinghood a being-at-work, for
what acts is always distinguished in stature above what is acted upon, as a governing
source is above the material it works on. Knowledge, in its being-at-work, is the same as
the thing it knows, and while knowledge in potency comes first in time in any one
knower, in the whole of things it does not take precedence even in time. This does not
mean that at one time it thinks but at another time it does not think, but when separated
it is just exactly what it is, and this alone is deathless and everlasting (though we have
no memory, because this sort of intellect is not acted upon, while the sort that is acted
upon is destructible), and without this nothing thinks.
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