Page:Aristotelous peri psuxes.djvu/308

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298
NOTES.
[BK. III.

want of a vernacular term; the French version gives them as "le son et la résonnance, et l'acte de ce qui peut entendre est l'ouïe ou l'audition." It is clear that hearing and sound, and other senses and actions, in reality, must coincide to eliminate sensation; although this does not, of course, apply, as the text observes, to the senses in potentiality. And, hence, in this state, there are, for a sentient being, no such qualities as white or black, bitter or sweet, as they depend, for their reality, upon a given condition of the sensibility, which depends again, in part, upon the will.

Note 4, p. 137. If a voice of any kind is harmony, &c.] This deviation from the immediate subject of the chapter, which was to prove that the five senses satisfy all our wants as sentient creatures, and that, therefore, there can be no other sense besides them, is, no doubt, episodical, although it is annexed, by the extremes of sounds, to the general argument upon sensibility. But the phrase itself is by its wording obscure, and, by its conclusion unsatisfactory, for it may not follow that, because voice may be harmony and harmony proportion, the hearing must be proportion also. It[1] has been suggested that, by a slight change of position in the words, and so, instead of the present wording, making harmony, voice to be (εἰ δ'ἡ φωνὴ συμφωνία vice εἰ δὴ συμφωνία φωνή τις) of any kind, it might be assumed that hearing should be harmony. Aristotle[2], by allotting

  1. Vide Trendel. Comment.
  2. De Part. Animalm, iv. 9. 2.