Leibniz's reply consists simply in carrying out this same thought somewhat further. It is granted that the idea of an infinite quantity of any kind is absurd and self-contradictory. But what does this prove, except that the notions of quantity and infinity are incompatible with each other, that they contradict each other? Hence, instead of the infinite being a mode of quantity, it must be conceived as essentially distinct from and even opposed to quantity. Locke's argument is virtually a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the notion that the infinite is capable of parts. In the few pages of comment which Leibniz in 1696 wrote upon Locke, this topic of the infinite is one of the few touched upon. His words upon that occasion were as follows: "I agree with Mr. Locke that, properly speaking, there is no space, time, nor number which is infinite; and that it is only true that however great be a space, a time, or a number, there is always another which is still greater, and this without end; and that, _therefore_, the infinite is not to be found in a whole made up of parts. But it does not cease to exist: it is found in the absolute, which is without parts, and of which compound things [phenomena in space and time, or facts which may be numbered] are only limitations. The positive infinite being nothing else than the absolute, it may be said that there is, in this sense, a positive idea of the infinite, and that it is anterior to the idea of the finite." In other words, while the infinite is to Locke an indefinite extension of the finite, which alone is positively "given," to Leibniz the infinite is the positive and real, and the finite is only in and by it. The finite is the negative.