How can all qualities be potentialities? It is easy to see that beauty
and health are qualities. But how could ugliness and sickness, weakness
and general impotence, be qualities? Is it because they qualify certain
things? But what hinders the qualified things from being called
such by mere nomenclature, as homonyms, and not because of a single
(all-sufficient) reason? Besides, what would hinder them from being
considered not only according to one of the four modes,[265] but even
after each one of the four, or at least after any two of them? First,
the quality does not consist in "acting" and "experiencing";[266] so
that it is only by placing oneself at different viewpoints that one
could call what "acts" and "experiences" a quality, in the same sense
as health and sickness, disposition and habitude, force and weakness.
Thus power is no longer the common element in these qualities, and
we shall have to seek something else possessing this characteristic,
and the qualities will no longer all be reasons. How indeed could a
sickness, become a habituation, or be a reason?