All arts are potentialities

Since some such originative sources are present in soulless things, and others in things possessed of soul, and in soul, and in the rational part of the soul, clearly some potencies will, be non-rational and some will be non-rational and some will be accompanied by a rational formula.

This is why all arts are potentialities. They are originative sources of change in another thing or in the artist himself considered as other.

Each of those which are accompanied by a rational formula is alike capable of contrary effects, but one non-rational power produces one effect. For example: the hot is capable only of heating, but the medical art can produce both disease and health.

The reason is that science is a rational formula, and the same rational formula explains a thing and its privation, only not in the same way.

In a sense it applies to both, but in a sense it applies rather to the positive fact. Therefore such sciences must deal with contraries, but with one in virtue of their own nature and with the other not in virtue of their nature; for the rational formula applies to one object in virtue of that object’s nature, and to the other, in a sense, accidentally.

For it is by denial and removal that it exhibits the contrary; for the contrary is the primary privation, and this is the removal of the positive term. Now since contraries do not occur in the same thing, but science is a potency which depends on the possession of a rational formula, and the soul possesses an originative source of movement; therefore, while the wholesome produces only health and the calorific only heat and the frigorific only cold, the scientific man produces both the contrary effects.

The rational formula is one which applies to both, though not in the same way. It is in a soul which possesses an originative source of movement; so that the soul will start both processes from the same originative source, having linked them up with the same thing.

And so the things whose potency is according to a rational formula act contrariwise to the things whose potency is non-rational; for the products of the former are included under one originative source, the rational formula.

The potency of merely doing a thing or having it done to one is implied in that of doing it or having it done well, but the latter is not always implied in the former= for he who does a thing well must also do it, but he who does it merely need not also do it well.