Coffey: Primary and Secondary Qualities #1

Coffey wrote much about primary qualities (or common sensibles) versus secondary qualities (or proper sensibles) in Epistemology; Or the Theory of Knowledge. He presents the scholastic view of secondary qualities with which he agrees as follows.

"The names of the various proper and secondary sense qualities,--of colors, sounds, tastes, smells, tactual and temperature qualities,--are not names of mental states, or of organic states, conditions or qualities, of the perceiver: they are names of qualities of external or extra-orgaanic bodies. But Aristotle, St. Thomas, and the scholastics generally, while holding that these qualities are really in external bodies independently of our actual perceptions of them, realized the necessity of distinguishing between the unperceived reality of these qualities, and the characters which their reality assumes in our actual perception of them: between those qualities in actu and in potentia. In the untasted sugar there is real sweetness but not the sensation or perception or taste of sweetness; in the unseen snow there is real whiteness but not the vision of whiteness, or actually perceived whiteness; in the unheard tempest there is real sound, but not the hearing or actual sensation or perception of sound; in the unsmelt violet there is real perfume but not the actual smell or perception of the perfume; and so on. In other words, if we understand the name of the sense quality to denote this quality as actually perceived,  and thereby to connote as part of its meaning the actual conscious perception process or state itself, then of course the quality so named cannot be in the unperceived external domain actually (in as much as the sensation or perception process is absent from the unperceived domain); but nevertheless the unperceived quality is really there, and we can say it is there potentially or virtually, meaning thereby, not that the quality is any less really these when unperceived than when perceived, but that as unperceived it is a potential or virtual percept or term of a conscious perceptive process; in other words that it is a reality capable of being perceived though not actually perceived" (Vol. 2, p. 106-7).