(1) In addition to the above mode of concrete and abstract names, there are many others. One of these [other modes] is that the concrete name and the [corresponding] abstract are sometimes synonymous. But, in order not to proceed in an ambiguous way, you have to know that the name ‘synonym’ is taken in two senses: strictly and broadly. Those synonyms are strictly so called which all users intend to use for the same [thing]. I am not talking about synonyms in this sense here. Those synonyms are broadly so called which simply signify the same [thing] in all ways, so that nothing is signified in any way by the one [synonym] unless it is signified in the same way by the other, even though not all users believe them to signify the same [thing] but rather, under a deception, they judge something to be signified by the one that is not signified by the other. For example, if someone should judge that the name ‘God’ conveyed a whole and ‘deity’ a part of it.1 I intend to use the name ‘synonym’ in this second sense in this chapter and in many others.
(2) I say that a concrete [name] and the [corresponding] abstract [name] are sometimes synonyms. For example, according to the Philosopher’s view,2 ‘God’ and ‘deity’, ‘man’ and ‘humanity’, ‘animal’ and ‘animality’, ‘horse’ and ‘horsehood’. It is for this reason that we have many names like these concrete [terms], but not [many] like the abstract [terms]. For although the authoritative [writers] often use the name ‘humanity’ and the name ‘animality’, and sometimes the name ‘horsehood’ (which correspond as abstracts to the names ‘man’, ‘animal’, ‘horse’ [respectively]), nevertheless names like ‘cowship’, ‘asininity’, ‘goathood’, ‘whitenesshood’, ‘blacknesshood’, ‘colorship’, ‘sweetnesshood’ are rarely or never found — even though we frequently use the names ‘cow’, ‘ass’, ‘goat’, ‘whiteness’, ‘blackness’, ‘sweetness’, ‘color’.
(3) Indeed, just as among the ancient philosophers the names ‘heat/hotness’, ‘cold3/coldness’ are synonyms, so [too] ‘horse/horsehood’, ‘man/humanity’ were synonyms for them. They did not bother in such cases to distinguish between concrete and abstract names with respect to their signification, even though the one [of the terms] had more syllables and the [syntactical] form of abstract [names] in the first of the above senses,4 and the other one did not but instead [had] more the [syntactical] form of concrete [names] in the first of the above senses.5 They employed a diversity of such names only for the sake of decorating their speech or for some other accidental reason, just as [they employed] synonyms [only for some such accidental reason].
(4) According to the Philosopher’s and the Commentator’s6 view, under this mode of concrete and abstract names there are included all names of substances and the abstract [forms that are] constructed from them and supposit neither for an accident nor for a part nor for the whole of what is conveyed by the name [that is] concrete in form nor for anything disparate from [that whole]. According to those [people], ‘animality’, ‘horsehood’, and such are like this. For ‘animality’ does not supposit for any accident of an animal, or for a part [of an animal], or for any whole such that part of it is an animal, or for any extrinsic thing totally distinct from an animal.
(5) All abstract names grouped together in the category of quantity, and all names that are the proper attributes7 of what are contained in the category of quantity, are also contained under [this] same mode. This [is true] according to the view of those who maintain that quantity is not a thing other than substance and quality,8 but not according to the view of those who maintain that quantity is an absolute thing really distinct from substance and from quality. Thus, according to the former view, ‘quantum’ and ‘quantity’ are synonymous, and likewise ‘long’ and ‘length’, ‘broad’ and ‘breadth’, ‘deep’ and ‘depth’, ‘plural’ and ‘plurality’, and so on.