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and because objects in which magnitudes inhere are themselves designated as quantities. We call a thing great or small from its participation in a high number or a low. True, greatness and smallness are not claimed to be quantities, but relations: but it is by their apparent possession of quantity that they are thought of as relations. All this, however, needs more careful examination.

In sum, we hold that there is no single genus of Quantity. Only number is Quantity, the rest (magnitudes, space, time, motion) quantities only in a secondary degree. We have therefore not strictly one genus, but one category grouping the approximate with the primary and the secondary.

We have however to enquire in what sense the abstract numbers are substances. Can it be that they are also in a manner quantitative? Into whatever category they fall, the other numbers (those inherent in objects) can have nothing in common with them but the name.

5.

Speech, time, motion—in what sense are these quantities?

Let us begin with speech. It is subject to measurement, but only in so far as it is sound; it is not a quantity in its essential nature, which nature is that it be significant, as noun and verb are significant. The air is (not its essence but) its Matter, as it is Matter to verb and noun, the components of speech.

To be more precise, we may define speech as an impact (made upon the outer air by the breath), though it is not so much the impact as the impression which the impact produces and which as it were imposes Form (upon the air). Speech, thus, is rather an action than a quantity—an action with a significance. Though perhaps it would be truer to say that while this motion, this impact, is an action, the counter-motion is an experience (or Passion); or each may be from different points of view either an action or an experience: or we may think of speech as action upon a substrate (air) and experience within that substrate.

If however voice is not characteristically impact, but is simply air, two categories will be involved: voice is significant, and the one category