It can be said that quantity, regarded as...

“It can be said that quantity, regarded as constituting the substantial side of our world, is as it were its ‘basic’ or fundamental condition: but care must be taken not to go too far and attribute to it an importance of a higher order than is justifiable, and more particularly not to try to extract from it the explanation of this world. The foundation of a building must not be confused with its superstructure: while there is only a foundation there is still no building, although the foundation is indispensable to the building; in the same way, while there is only a quantity there is still no sensible manifestation, although sensible manifestation has its very root in quantity. Quantity, considered by itself, is only a necessary ‘presupposition’, but it explains nothing; it is indeed a base, but nothing else, and it must not be forgotten that the base is by definition that which is situated at the lowest level, so that the reduction of quality to quantity is intrinsically nothing but a ‘reduction of the higher to the lower’, and some have very rightly attributed this very character to materialism: to claim to derive the ‘greater’ from the ‘lesser’ is indeed one of the most typical of modern aberrations.”

The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times

(originally published in French, 1945)

Rene Guenon