4. Let us now examine how the numbers form part of the intelligible
world. Are they inherent in the other forms? Or are they, since all
eternity, the consequences of the existence of these forms? In the
latter case, as the very essence possessed primary existence, we would
first conceive the monad; then, as movement and stability emanated from
it, we would have the triad; and each one of the remaining intelligible
entities would lead to the conception of some of the other numbers. If
it were not so, if a unity were inherent in each intelligible entity,
the unity inherent in the first Essence would be the monad; the unity
inherent in what followed it, if there be an order in the intelligible
entities, would be the "pair"; last, the unity inhering in some other
intelligible entity, such as, for instance, in ten, would be the decad.
Nevertheless this could not yet be so, each number being conceived as
existing in itself. In this case, will we be compelled to admit that
number is anterior to the other intelligible entities, or posterior
thereto? On this subject Plato[9] says that men have arrived to the
notion of number by the succession of days and nights, and he thus
refers the conception of number to the diversity of (objective) things.
He therefore seems to teach that it is first the numbered objects that
by their diversity produce numbers, that number results from movement
of the soul, which passes from one object to another, and that it is
thus begotten when the soul enumerates; that is, when she says to
herself, Here is one object, and there is another; while, so long as
she thinks of one and the same object, she affirms nothing but unity.
But when Plato says that being is in the veritable number, and that the
number is in the being,[10] he intends to teach that by itself number
possesses a hypostatic substantial existence, that it is not begotten
in the soul which enumerates, but that the variety of sense-objects
merely recalls to the soul the notion of number.