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CH. V.] which may be regarded as the sensibility, which is required for the material.

Note 3, p. 84. Since we speak of sentient perception, &c.] These passages upon perception and sensation, which, in themselves, when deeply inquired into, are sufficiently obscure, are still less, if possible, apprehensible, on account of the wording and the attempted illustration by the leading terms, potentiality and reality. It is obvious, however, that we may and do speak of an individual as one who hears and sees, whether or not, at the moment, conscious of sound or colour; whether that is, awake or asleep, active or quiescent, in potentiality or reality. But an individual is, strictly speaking, only then seeing and hearing when he is actually sensible of colours and sounds; just as an individual, to use Aristotle's analogy, is only then to be accounted really learned, when actually reflecting upon and exercising some one special subject of knowledge. All attempts, however, to scrutinize the operations, so to speak, of the sensibility under impression from without or excitation from within soon lose, even with the advanced knowledge of this age, the character of inductive science, and are lost, as in the text, in the maze of metaphysical abstractions. It seems to be the object of the argument to prove, that the, before being acted upon by external objects, such as light, sound, colour, &c., exists in potentiality and is unlike; when acted upon, it is raised to the state of reality, and thus made like to that by which the impression is made.