You see something which you pronounce to be a unity; that thing possesses also size, form, and a host of other characteristics you might name; size, bulk, sweetness, bitterness and other Ideas are actually present in the thing; it surely cannot be thought that, while every conceivable quality has Real-Being, quantity [Number] has not and that while continuous quantity exists, discrete quantity does not and this though continuous quantity is measured by the discrete.
No: as size by the presence of Magnitude, and Oneness by the presence of Unity, so with Duality and all the other numerical modes.
As to the How of participation, the enquiry is that of all participation in Ideal Forms; we must note, however, that the presence of the Decad in the looser totals is different from its presence in the continuous; there is difference again in its presence within many powers where multiplicity is concentred in unity; arrived at the Intellectuals, there too we discover Number, the Authentic Number, no longer entering the alien, Decad-Absolute not Decad of some particular Intellectual group.
15.We must repeat: The Collective Being, the Authentic, There, is at once Being and Intellectual-Principle and the Complete Living Form;thus it includes the total of living things; the Unity There is reproduced by the unity of this living universe in the degree possible to it- for the sense-nature as such cannot compass that transcendental unity- thus that Living-All is inevitably Number-Entire: if the Number were not complete, the All would be deficient to the extent of some number, and if every number applicable to living things were not contained in it, it would not be the all-comprehending Life-Form.
Therefore, Number exists before every living thing, before the collective Life-Form.
Again: Man exists in the Intellectual and with him all other living things, both by possession of Real-Being and because that is the Life-Form Complete.Even the man of this sphere is a member of the Intellectual since that is the Life-Form Complete; every living thing by virtue of having life, is There, There in the Life-form, and man is There also, in the Intellectual, in so far as he is intellect, for all intelligences are severally members of That.Now all this means Number There.Yet even in Intellect Number is not present primally; its presence There is the reckoning of the Acts of Intellectual-Principle; it tallies with the justice in Intellectual-Principle, its moral wisdom, its virtues, its knowledge, all whose possession makes That Principle what it is.
But knowledge- must not this imply presence to the alien? No;knowledge, known and knower are an identity; so with all the rest;every member of Intellectual-Principle is therefore present to it primally; justice, for example, is not accidental to it as to soul in its character as soul, where these virtues are mainly potential becoming actual by the intention towards Intellectual-Principle and association with it.
Next we come to Being, fully realized, and this is the seat of Number; by Number, Being brings forth the Beings; its movement is planned to Number; it establishes the numbers of its offspring before bringing them to be, in the same way as it establishes its own unity by linking pure Being to the First: the numbers do not link the lower to the First; it suffices that Being is so linked;for Being, in taking form as Number, binds its members to itself.As a unity, it suffers no division, remaining self-constant; as a thing of division, containing its chosen total of members, it knows that total and so brings forth Number, a phase therefore of its content:
its development of part is ruled by the powers of Number, and the Beings it produces sum to that Number.Thus Number, the primal and true, is Principle and source of actuality to the Beings.
Hence it is that in our sphere, also, Number accompanies the coming to be of particular things and to suppose another number than the actual is to suppose the production of something else or of nothing.
These then are the primal numbers; they are numerable; the numbers of the other order are of a double character; as derived from the first numbers they are themselves numerable but as acting for those first they are measures of the rest of things, numbering numbers and numerables.For how could they declare a Decad save in the light of numbers within themselves?
16.But here we may be questioned about these numbers which we describe as the primal and authentic:
"Where do you place these numbers, in what genus among Beings?
To everyone they seem to come under Quantity and you have certainly brought Quantity in, where you say that discrete Quantity equally with the continuous holds place among Beings; but you go on to say that there are the numbers belonging to the Firsts and then talk of other numbers quite distinct, those of reckoning; tell us how you arrange all this, for there is difficulty here.And then, the unity in sense-things- is that a quantity or is quantity here just so many units brought together, the unity being the starting-point of quantity but not quantity itself? And, if the starting-point, is it a kindred thing or of another genus? All this you owe it to us to make clear."Be it so; we begin by pointing out a distinction:
You take one thing with another- for we must first deal with objects of sense- a dog and a man, or two men; or you take a group and affirm ten, a decad of men: in this case the number affirmed is not a Reality, even as Reality goes in the sphere of sense, but is purely Quantity: similarly when you resolve into units, breaking up the decad, those units are your principle of Quantity since the single individual is not a unity absolute.
But the case is different when you consider one man in himself and affirm a certain number, duality, for example, in that he is at once living and reasoning.
