MATTER IS NOTHING COMPOSITE, BUT BY NATURE SIMPLE AND ONE.
8. What then is this matter which is one, continuous, and without qualities? Evidently, it could not be a body, since it has no quality; if it were a body, it would have a quality. We say that it is the matter of all sense-objects, and not the matter of some, and the form of others, just as clay is matter, in respect to the potter, without being matter absolutely (as thought Aristotle).[295] As we are not considering the matter of any particular object, but the matter of all things, we would not attribute to its nature anything of what falls under our senses—no quality, color, heat, cold, lightness, weight, density, sparseness, figure or magnitude; for magnitude is something entirely different from being large, and figure from the figured object. Matter therefore is not anything composite, but something simple, and by nature one (according to the views of Plato and Aristotle combined).[296] Only thus could matter be deprived of all properties (as it is).