A collection, or system, is an abstraction or abstract ens; and thus the whole doctrine of number is founded on the operation of abstraction. If we conceive an object to be a collective whole, but to be so in such a way that it has no part which is not itself a collective whole in the same way, then, if the collection is of the nature of a sorite, it is a general, whose parts are distinguished merely as having additional characters; but if the collection is a set, whose members have other relations to one another, it is a continuum.