this is an invalid designation, as we have established elsewhere. The designation here is likewise of the same kind, as we have established. The dispute here concerns not wording but meaning. Thus, you may be asked regarding those attributes: if they are alike, each attribute must be interchangeable with the others, so that knowledge would take the place of power, and life the place of speech. This is false. If, however, they are different, each attribute shares with the others the fact that it is an attribute, while differing from them in its distinctive character. What they have in common is distinct from what differentiates them. Each attribute would therefore be composed of two parts: one accounting for what it shares with the others, and another accounting for what distinguishes it. Each of those two parts would, in turn, share one part with something else and differ from it in another, and so on.

Thus, the argument that every composite consists of two parts, and every part consists of two further parts, applies both to what is said to be composed in terms of magnitude and quantity and to what is composed in terms of attribute and quality. If either of these two kinds of composition necessitates