This analogy of the warrior pierced at the same time with his shield illustrates Aristotle’s view of the eighth Category — Habere: of which he gives ὥπλισται as the example. He considers a man’s clothes and defensive weapons as standing in a peculiar relation to him like a personal appurtenance and almost as a part of himself. It is under this point of view that he erects Habere into a distinct Category.
[103] Aristot. De Animâ, II. xi. p. 423, b. 22-26: ᾗ καὶ δῆλον ὅτι ἐντὸς τὸ τοῦ ἁπτοῦ αἰσθητικόν. — τὸ μεταξὺ τοῦ ἁπτικοῦ ἡ σάρξ.
[104] Aristot. De Partibus Animal. II. x. p. 656, a. 30; De Vitâ et Morte, iii. p. 469, a. 12: De Somno et Vigil. ii. p. 455, a. 23; De Sensu et Sensili, ii. p. 439, a. 2.
Having gone through the five senses seriatim, Aristotle offers various reasons to prove that there neither are, nor can be, more than five; and then discusses some complicated phenomena of sense. We perceive that we see or hear;[105] do we perceive this by sight or by hearing? and if not, by what other faculty?[106] Aristotle replies by saying that the act of sense is one and the same, but that it may be looked at in two different points of view. We see a coloured object; we hear a sound: in each case the act of sense is one; the energy or actuality of the visum, and videns, of the sonans and audiens, is implicated and indivisible. But the potentiality of the one is quite distinct from the potentiality of the other, and may be considered as well as named apart.[107] When we say: I perceive that I see — we look at the same act of vision from the side of the videns; the visum being put out of sight as the unnoticed correlate. This is a mental fact distinct from, though following upon, the act of vision itself. Aristotle refers it rather to that general sentient soul or faculty, of which the five senses are partial and separate manifestations, than to the sense of vision itself.[108] He thus considers what would now be termed consciousness of a sensation, as being merely the subjective view of the sensation, distinguished by abstraction from the objective.
[105] In modern psychology the language would be — “We are conscious that we see or hear.� But Sir William Hamilton has remarked that the word Consciousness has no equivalent usually or familiarly employed in the Greek psychology.
[106] Aristot. De Animâ, III. ii. p. 425, b. 14.
[107] Ibid. b. 26; p. 426, a. 16-19.
[108] Aristot. De Somno et Vigil. ii. p. 455, a. 12-17; De Animâ, III. ii. with Torstrick’s note, p. 166, and the exposition of Alexander of Aphrodisias therein cited. These two passages of Aristotle are to a certain extent different yet not contradictory, though Torstrick supposes them to be so.
It is the same general sentient faculty, though diversified and logically distinguishable in its manifestations, that enables us to conceive many sensations as combined into one; and to compare or discriminate sensations belonging to different senses.[109]
[109] Aristot. De Sensu et Sensili, vii. p. 449, a. 8-20.