[Arisbe] Re: Inquiry Into Inquiry

[Jon Awbrey]

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| [One From Portia's Train]
|
|            Tell me where is fancy bred,
|            Or in the heart, or in the head?
|            How begot, how nourishèd?
| [All]         Reply, reply.
|
| [One From Portia's Train]
|
|            It is engendered in the eyes,
|            With gazing fed;  and fancy dies
|            In the cradle where it lies.
|              Let us all ring fancy's knell.
|              I'll begin it:  ding, dong, bell.
| [All]            Ding, dong, bell.
|
| Shakespeare, 'Merchant of Venice', 3.2.63-72

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| Now summing up what we have said about the soul,
| let us assert once more that in a sense the soul
| is all existing things.  What exists is either
| sensible ('aistheta') or intelligible ('noeta');
| and in a sense knowledge ('episteme') is the knowable
| and sensation ('aisthesis') is the sensible.  We must
| consider in what sense this is so.  Both knowledge and
| sensation are divided to correspond to their objects
| ('pragmata'), the potential ('dynamei') to the potential,
| and the actual ('entelecheia') to the actual.  The sensitive
| and cognitive faculties of the soul are potentially these
| objects, viz., the sensible and the knowable.  These faculties,
| then, must be identical either with the objects themselves or
| with their forms ('eide').  Now they are not identical with the
| objects;  for the stone ('lithos') does not exist in the soul,
| but only the form ('eidos') of the stone.  The soul, then, acts
| like a hand ('cheir');  for the hand is an instrument ('organon')
| which employs instruments, and in the same way the mind is a form
| which employs forms, and sense is a form which employs the forms
| of sensible objects.  But since apparently nothing has a separate
| existence, except sensible magnitudes, the objects of thought --
| both the so-called abstractions of mathematics and all states
| and affections of sensible things -- reside in the sensible
| forms.  And for this reason as no one could ever learn or
| understand anything without the exercise of perception,
| so even when we think speculatively, we must have some
| mental picture of which to think;  for mental images
| are similar to objects perceived except that they
| are without matter.  But imagination is not the
| same thing as assertion and denial;  for truth
| and falsehood involve a combination of notions.
| How then will the simplest notions differ from
| mental pictures?  Surely neither these simple
| notions nor any others are mental pictures, but
| they cannot occur without such mental pictures.
|
| Aristotle, 'Peri Psyche', 3.8.
|
| Aristotle, "On The Soul", in 'Aristotle (Volume 8)',
| W.S. Hett (trans.), William Heinemann, London, UK, 1986.
| First printed 1936.  

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Incidental Musement --

http://www.stratfordfestival.ca/2001/playbill/merchantofvenice.html

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