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Date: w. 350 B.C.

The soul "is substance in the sense which corresponds to the definitive formula of a thing's essence."

— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

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Date: w. 350 B.C.

"Voice is a kind of sound characteristic of what has soul in it; nothing that is without soul utters voice, it being only by a metaphor that we speak of the voice of a flute or the lyre or generally of what (being without soul) possesses the power of producing a succession of notes which differ i...

— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

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Date: w. 350 B.C.

"It follows that the soul is analogous to the hand; for as the hand is a tool of tools, so the mind is the form of forms and sense the form of sensible things."

— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

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Date: w. 350 B.C.

"The process [of thinking] is like that in which the air modifies the pupil in this or that way and the pupil transmits the modification to some third thing (and similarly in hearing), while the ultimate point of arrival is one, a single mean, with different manners of being."

— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

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Date: w. 350 B.C.

"This is what led Democritus to say that soul is a sort of fire or hot substance; his 'forms' or atoms are infinite in number; those which are spherical he calls fire and soul, and compares them to the motes in the air which we see in shafts of light coming through windows."

— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

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Date: w. 350 B.C.

"The doctrine of the Pythagoreans seems to rest upon the same ideas; some of them declared the motes in air, others what moved them, to be soul."

— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

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Date: 350 B.C.

"Suppose that the eye were an animal--sight would have been its soul, for sight is the substance or essence of the eye which corresponds to the formula, the eye being merely the matter of seeing; when seeing is removed the eye is no longer an eye, except in name"

— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

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Date: 350 B.C.

"It is not necessary to ask whether the soul and its body are one, just as we do not ask about wax and its shape."

— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

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Date: 350 B.C.

"What it thinks must be in it just as characters may be said to be on a writing-tablet on which as yet nothing actually stands written: this is exactly what happens with mind."

— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

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Date: w. 350 B.C.

"Generally, about all perception, we can say that a sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold; what produces the impression is a signet of ...

— Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

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The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.