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 in-
timate 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 sensi-
bility, 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.
