But if this is admitted, that lines and points are substance
more than bodies, but we do not see to what sort of bodies these could
belong (for they cannot be in perceptible bodies), there can be no
substance.-Further, these are all evidently divisions of body,-one
in breadth, another in depth, another in length. Besides this, no sort
of shape is present in the solid more than any other; so that if the
Hermes is not in the stone, neither is the half of the cube in the
cube as something determinate; therefore the surface is not in it
either; for if any sort of surface were in it, the surface which marks
off the half of the cube would be in it too. And the same account
applies to the line and to the point and the unit. Therefore, if on
the one hand body is in the highest degree substance, and on the other
hand these things are so more than body, but these are not even
instances of substance, it baffles us to say what being is and what
the substance of things is.-For besides what has been said, the
questions of generation and instruction confront us with further
paradoxes. For if substance, not having existed before, now exists, or
having existed before, afterwards does not exist, this change is
thought to be accompanied by a process of becoming or perishing; but
points and lines and surfaces cannot be in process either of
becoming or of perishing, when they at one time exist and at another
do not. For when bodies come into contact or are divided, their
boundaries simultaneously become one in the one case when they
touch, and two in the other-when they are divided; so that when they
have been put together one boundary does not exist but has perished,
and when they have been divided the boundaries exist which before
did not exist (for it cannot be said that the point, which is
indivisible, was divided into two).
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