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of triangles, rectangles, and figures generally, whether plane or solid: this may be given as a ground for regarding equality and inequality as characteristic of Quantity.
It remains to enquire whether similarity and dissimilarity are characteristic of Quality.
We have spoken of Quality as combining with other entities, Matter and Quantity, to form the complete Sensible Substance; this Substance, so called, may be supposed to constitute the manifold world of Sense, which is not so much an essence as a quale. Thus, for the essence of fire we must look to the Reason-Principle; what produces the visible aspect is, properly speaking, a quale.
Man's essence will lie in his Reason-Principle; that which is perfected in the corporeal nature is a mere image of the Reason-Principle, a quale rather than an essence.
Consider: the visible Socrates is a man, yet we give the name of Socrates to that likeness of him in a portrait, which consists of mere colours, mere pigments: similarly, it is a Reason-Principle which constitutes Socrates, but we apply the name Socrates to the Socrates we see: in truth, however, the colours and shapes which make up the visible Socrates are but reproductions of those in the Reason-Principle, while this Reason-Principle itself bears a corresponding relation to the truest Reason-Principle of Man.—But we need not elaborate this point.
16.
When each of the entities bound up with the pseudo-substance is taken apart from the rest, the name of Quality is given to that one among them, by which without pointing to essence or quantity or motion we signify the distinctive mark, the type or aspect of a thing—for example, the beauty or ugliness of a body. This beauty—need we say?—is identical in name only with Intellectual Beauty: it follows that the term "Quality" as applied to the Sensible and the Intellectual is necessarily equivocal; even blackness and whiteness are different in the two spheres.
But the beauty in the germ, in the particular Reason-Principle—is this the same as the manifested beauty, or do they coincide only in