And also great and small, and greater and
smaller, both in themselves and when taken relatively to each other,
are by their own nature attributes of what is quantitative; but
these names are transferred to other things also. Of things that are
quanta incidentally, some are so called in the sense in which it was
said that the musical and the white were quanta, viz. because that
to which musicalness and whiteness belong is a quantum, and some are
quanta in the way in which movement and time are so; for these also
are called quanta of a sort and continuous because the things of which
these are attributes are divisible. I mean not that which is moved,
but the space through which it is moved; for because that is a quantum
movement also is a quantum, and because this is a quantum time is one.
14
'Quality' means (1) the differentia of the essence, e.g. man is an
animal of a certain quality because he is two-footed, and the horse is
so because it is four-footed; and a circle is a figure of particular
quality because it is without angles,-which shows that the essential
differentia is a quality.-This, then, is one meaning of quality-the
differentia of the essence, but (2) there is another sense in which it
applies to the unmovable objects of mathematics, the sense in which
the numbers have a certain quality, e.g. the composite numbers which
are not in one dimension only, but of which the plane and the solid
are copies (these are those which have two or three factors); and in
general that which exists in the essence of numbers besides quantity
is quality; for the essence of each is what it is once, e.
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