not yet actual, and may perhaps never become so. Form is the actual, the energy, the entelechy which actualises the potential and determines the final compound.
These few definitions will make clear the singularly ingenious idea of Aristotle on the nature of the body, the soul, and of their union. The body is matter which is only intelligible as the correlatum of form; it can neither exist by itself nor be known by itself—that is to say, when considered outside this relation. The soul is form, the actual. By uniting with the body it constitutes the living subject. The soul is the relatum, and is unintelligible and void of sense without its correlatum. “The soul,” says Aristotle, “is not a variety of body, but it could not exist without a body: the soul is not a body, but something which belongs or is relative to a body.” The animated subject is a form plunged and engaged in matter, and all its actions and passions are so likewise. Each has its formal side which concerns the soul, and its material side which concerns the body. The emotion which belongs to the animated subject or aggregate of soul and body is a complex fact having two aspects logically distinguishable from each other, each of which is correlative to the other and implies it. It is thus not only with our passions, but also with our perceptions, our imaginations, reminiscences,
