sense, (for we speak of one who hears and sees, in potentiality, as “one hearing and seeing,” although he may happen to be asleep, and we say the same of one who is actually employing those senses,) so may sensation be spoken of in two ways, as subsisting in potentiality and subsisting in activity. Let us, however, before proceeding further, observe that impression, motion, and action are for us equivalent terms—for motion is a kind of action, although an action which is incomplete, as has been elsewhere explained. Now, all things which are impressed and set in motion are so affected by something capable of making impression and existing in activity; so that impression is in one sense by like, and in another sense by unlike, as we have said—for the unlike is subject to impression, but, having been impressed, it is converted into like. A distinction, however, must be drawn between the terms potentiality and reality, for we are now going to employ them in an absolute sense—any individual whatever, then, may be learned, as we might speak of any man as learned, because man is among beings capable of learning and being learned; and so we speak of a man as learned, from his actually professing, at the time, grammatical or other knowledge.
Thus, each of these individuals is learned in potentiality, although in a different manner—the one is so because he is of a certain genus and peculiar
