Excerpts from H.J. Blumenthal's 2000 translation. Page numbers of the translation.
p. 22
"On what basis then does he argue that there is no other sense besides the five? The belief in this does not come from induction: there are more unapparent types of living beings than ones we can clearly see. Some are also mortal, the others are those that are superhuman. Nor can it be argued from the elements, on the basis of each of them coming under its own sense, they being four, as well as the exhalation of which smell is said to be the sense, as sight is of fire, hearing of air and the other senses of the others, smell of water and touch of earth. For fire is cognized not only by sight but also by touch, as being hot. So it is unclear whether it has some other quality which we do not know about because we lack a sense which perceives it. How then does Aristotle make us believe that there are only five senses? From the perfection of the life in us and the fact that our sense-organs are not insufficient. Any sense would be insufficient either because the life is dim and is as if one had fainted, being too weak to act in respect of all of them, or because of the insufficiency of the instruments, which are the sense-organs. If therefore the life is perfect and none of the sense-organs is missing, it is reasonable and even necessary that such living beings have all the senses."
p. 26f
424b26 it is necessary that, if any sense is missing, a senseorgan is missing in us too.
"This is, as has been said, the second hypothetical argument of the series: what is meant by ‘necessary’ deserves comment. Why, if the sense of vision alone is absent, and the organ of sight can be airy, is this not present in a creature having hearing, so that it has the sense-organ but vision, being absent, does not use it as an organ of vision? It seems as if the absence of a sense-organ has two senses, the first being that the basic body, whichever is useable for the missing sense, is absent, as if air or water, unmixed, were not present in themselves in some living beings. The other is that it is present but not, shall we say, as able to see. For it would not have existed pointlessly as able to see in a creature which has not the natural capacity to see. Perhaps the argument is closer to the truth in the case of perfect living beings. That is why he said ‘in us’, and not simply ‘if a sense were to be missing then a sense-organ would be missing too’, but in us who have the five senses. If there were some other sense, then the body would have some other kind of sense-organ, or use the existing ones in some other way. But it is impossible for there to be another sense-organ as an instrument, since there is no other perishable body apart from the four, and the heavenly body is not subordinated to the divine soul as an organ: for it is not subordinate to it because the soul uses it, but because all of it belongs to the soul. Moreover the bodies here do not have the capacity to be percipient in some other way. For in a perfect form of life there would be some power using them. Therefore it is necessary that those who do not have this power, and this is not through a mutilation nor because of imperfection, do not have the organ either. For all the powers are present in the complete life, and their nature consequently provides all the organs too, if the living being is not unnaturally defective, that is whenever though the power is present the organ is missing. Therefore it is not said that when the sense-organ is missing then the perceiving faculty is missing too, but the other way round, that if the sense-organ is not missing then the sense is not missing either, and that this is so in us who have the five senses and are perfect, as being able to move with the motion that is defined in respect of place."
p. 48f
"Neither the excessively low nor the excessively high sound can be heard, since the excessively high destroys the hearing, as excessive brightness does vision, and in the case of the other senses the whole constitution of the living being is destroyed, clearly by objects of touch of greater intensity and by the flavours that overwhelm them, and also some smells, like the ones in the Charonian places."
p. 75
Imagination "is not present in plants, nor in things which have no life at all, nor in the things which are above sense-perception, which have their existence in accordance with intellect or intellective reason. This is so since the activities of imagination involve extension and shape, while those of pure reason, and a fortiori those of intellect, are above the division of extension and shape. Should one then not attribute imagination to the heavenly bodies? Yes, if one attributes even sense-perception to them, and in the same way as sense-perception, which is stimulated entirely internally and from itself, and is able to bring into existence and cognize all sense-objects and, before external things, the determinate preconception of sensible objects which is situated in the divine vehicles themselves, in accordance with corporeal reason-principles. These do not impart shape and are not different at different times, but they are contiguous with the ones that do impart shape, and they contain, from a position of superiority, the infinitude of things which are different at different times."
p.78
429a10 As for the part of the soul with which it knows and thinks, [whether it be separate or not spatially separate but logically so, we must investigate what differentiating feature it has and how thinking happens at any given time].
"What the separate intellect of the soul is and what kind of thing it is, that it is first substance and is undivided, the best form of life and the supreme activity, and that the same intellect is object of intellection and intellection, and is eternity, completeness, rest and the determinant and cause of everything, has been dealt with more opportunely and more completely in what has been written on book lambda of the Metaphysics, following Iamblichus’ investigations about it in accordance with Aristotle’s purpose. Now we must rather discuss what kind of thing the intellect participated by our soul is."
This very interesting discussion about 'the intellect participated by our soul' goes on to p. 83.
p. 112
"[W]hy would anyone say the soul’s intellect differs from the true intellect if, in addition to the rest, it
were ‘in its substance activity’? Perhaps just as the passible intellect which is still imperfect was compared in respect of its impassibility and potentiality with the sensitive faculty – how it differed was defined later – so he applies what has been said, which in the first place was appropriate to the more divine intellect and then secondarily to the soul’s substantial intellect, because of its kinship with it, to the soul’s highest intellect, which was being compared with the higher intellect: he brings in the difference next."
p. 117
"[I]t is clear again that his discussion is about the soul, and not about the higher intellect. For what sort of problem would he have had about why we do not remember, if it is the things superior to us that are everlasting? And the solution to the objection is appropriate to soul, namely that the intellect that acts is impassible and for this reason immortal, while the passible intellect is perishable qua passible, as I said, as also when it is being brought together with what is at rest, and without the passible intellect, qua passible and proceeding as far as corporeal lives, the impassible intellect clearly thinks none of the things that can be remembered, which is what Aristotle is talking about. Those things, as he himself teaches us elsewhere, are things that can be imagined. Therefore in thinking about things that can be remembered we do certainly need the reason that proceeds as far as the imagination, and without this not even the impassible intellect will think any of the things that can be remembered. The ‘nothing’ must not be understood simply as meaning that the impassible intellect thinks nothing without the passible one. For how will it still be separate, how unmixed, how activity in its substance? For even while it is still giving life to this body, the soul sometimes lives and thinks separately. ‘What god is always’, he says in the Metaphysics book lambda, ‘that we are sometimes’, clearly as far as our power allows. But god is always separate: and therefore we too are, even if only sometimes. We are the ones who are still living this physical life, when the soul is, even if only briefly, disposed to the body and the secondary lives, but in such a way as not to be attached to them."
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