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Prelude to Chapter VII.
Commentators are generally agreed in regarding this chapter as a series of ill-connected repetitions of former statements and doctrines; but, although repetitions, they will be found to illustrate or tend to the completion of some preceding opinions. It maintains, in fact, the same dogmata, adopts the same illustrations, and assumes a faculty, the representative of a sensorium, which physiology could not then supply; and thus, although the wording may differ, the purport is the same. The term ἐνέργεια (which was before alluded to) is employed, in a more especial manner in this chapter, and as neither its meaning is obvious nor its equivalent easily selected, it may be well to offer a few words in explanation of it. Although it is opposed, like the ἐντελέχεια, to δύναμις, still the two terms are not synonymous; for the former (the ἐνέργεια) seems to relate to action in some form, and the latter to completion or development of something out of an imperfect or nascent
