negation of Being mere and simple: Being-for-self is the negation of this, and so a return to true affirmation, as including the element of negation. Being seemed to describe a complete reality. But its latent limitation has become explicit. It only retains itself by a self-assertion which leaves it a mere abstract unit, or atom,--a unit with nothing in it to be united,-and where it matters not whether it be somewhat or other. The quality of Being, in which all qualitative attributes are lost and sunk, is Quantity: the characteristic of which is to be a matter of no importance to Being, as it originally presents itself. In other words, whilst Quality is identical with Being,--while Being means qualitativeness, and the Being of a thing means its quality, or constitution; Quantity is external to Being, and a thing is, while its quantity undergoes all sorts of variation. At least this is true within certain limits: for quantity is not an ultimate category any more than quality. But for the present the truth of quality is quantity; or, in other words, if a thing is to be anything definite it must ultimately rest on a solid atom: must be a unit and amenable to measurement. First come qualities, such as sweet, green, and the like: these seem to be truth and reality to the senses and the natural mind: and in their universality are represented by the abstract terms of qualitative being. The first step in the progress of knowledge consists in seeing that quality presupposes quantity. Number, in short, is the proximate truth to which the vague qualitative distinction of _a, some,_ and _each_ is to be reduced. The qualitative differences of sounds are reduced to relations or ratios of number: and so are the other data of sensation. We see this truth recognised in the Atomic School, which may be taken to represent the summing-up of that period of thought which begins with the 'Being' of Parmenides, and the 'Becoming' of Heraclitus. When Democritus says that, although bitter and sweet are conventional distinctions, yet in reality there is only atoms and void[11], he is introducing a distinction between real and apparent. But again the irregular and sporadic appearances of species of quality are replaced by a gradual and regular series of quantities. With mere Being you have a conception quite unfit for describing the manifold reality. But by breaking up the whole Being into a countless number of atoms of being, you get the means of establishing an equation between a given sensible and some multiple of the atomic unit. Thus Atomism, with its many bits of being and its interfluent non-being in which they can unite, replaces the total and complete universe of being and its attendant shadow of unreality, the world of opinion. Still the _Is not_ clings to the _Is_: if each atom seems complete, they are subject to a necessity which forces them by negation, i. e. by the void (as Atomism figuratively calls the repulsion of the atoms) to meet each other and