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Shannon O’Connor
Discuss what Aristotle means when he states, “The soul, then, must be a substance,
inasmuch as it is the form of a natural body that potentially possesses life; and such substance is
in fact realization, so that the soul is the realization of a body of this kind.” And, “We have, then
said in general what the soul is: it is a formal substance. That means that it is the essence of a
body of a particular kind.” The first quote is saying that matter and soul are what create a
substance. Without the soul the substance is now only potentially alive, what Melchert describes
as “What we have left is a body that could be alive, but isn’t” (Melchert 182). Meaning, that
without the body only could be alive, is a corpse. The second quote is saying, a substances
characteristics of life are a form giving the substance a soul. The example given by Melchert
would be with the axe “Suppose that an axe were a natural body. Then its “formal substance”
