2. Perception. Living things exhibit some form of perceptual conscious- ness or awareness. They are able not merely to act in the world but to be affected by the world and be aware of that affection.
Every human being has the ability or potentiality to speak English. But there is a difference between the potentiality that a newborn has to speak English and the potentiality of an adult English speaker.
This ability itself (as is made clear when one is silent) is distinct from the actuality of actually speaking, the activity that occurs when one is engaged in talking English.
Roughly, the analogy looks like this: The body is analogous to the infant’s ability to speak. The soul is analogous to the adult’s realized ability to speak. The activity of living is analogous to the activity of actual speech.
This scheme of Body/Soul/Living is only the global version of a scheme Aristotle employs throughout his work. With it he gives a general account of the activities that distinguish living beings, the activities we might call “psychic” (from the Greek psyche, soul): the activities of life.
One of the central capacities of animal life is the capacity for nutrition. Our ability to take in food and to make it into ourselves is analogous to the capacity for perception, our ability to perceive or take the world in and transform it, as it were, into conscious awareness.