SOUL AND MIND the power to taste sweet to suitable tasters; and the faculty of taste is nothing other than the power to taste such things as the sweetness of sweet objects Thus we can agree that the sensible property in operation is the same thing as the faculty in operation, though of course the power to taste and the power to be tasted are two diVerent things, one in an animal and the other in a substance This seems a sound and important philosophical analysis of the concept of sensation: it enables one to dispense with the notion, which has misled many philosophers, that sensation involves a transaction between the mind and some representation of what is sensed Aristotle’s detailed explanations of the chemical vehicles of sensory properties and the mechanism of the organs of sensation are very diVerent matters, speculative theories long since superannuated Though Aristotle is very critical of his predecessors in this area, such as Democritus and the Plato of the Timaeus, his own accounts are no less distant than theirs from the truth as discovered by the progress of science Besides the Wve senses and the general sense, Aristotle recognizes other faculties which later came to be grouped together as the ‘inner senses’: notably imagination (phantasia) (de An 3 427b28–429a9), and memory, to which he devoted an entire opuscule (de Memoria) Corresponding to the senses at the cognitive level, there is an aVective part of the soul, the locus of spontaneous felt emotion This is introduced in the Nicomachean Ethics as part of the soul that is basically irrational but which is, unlike the vegetative soul, capable of being controlled by the reason It is the part of the soul for desire and passion, corresponding to appetite and temper in the Platonic tripartite soul When brought under the sway of reason it is the home of the moral virtues such as courage and temperance (1 13 1102a26–1103a3) For Aristotle as for Plato the highest part of the soul is occupied by mind or reason, the locus of thought and understanding Thought diVers from sense-perception, and is restricted—on earth at least—to human beings (de An 3 427a18–b8) Thought, like sensation, is a matter of making judgements; but sensation concerns particulars, while intellectual knowledge is of universals (2 417b23) Aristotle makes a distinction between practical reasoning and theoretical reasoning, and makes a corresponding division of faculties within the mind There is a deliberative part of the rational soul (logistikon) which is concerned with human aVairs, and there is a scientiWc part (epistemonikon) that is concerned with eternal truths (NE 1139a16; 12 1144a2–3) This distinction is easy enough to understand; but in a famous 245