Adjectives Don’t Exist

“Abstractions like truth, beauty, and green are necessary in order for us to communicate at all. But we must be careful here because our entire problem rests in what we have thought we are allowed to do with abstractions. The lack of ‘existence’ is true of all adjectives, including those adjectives we call numbers. One, three, and seven do not exist independently of the nouns they modify — e.g. one truck, three beers, or the seven churches of the province of Asia” (The Paideia of God, pp. 83-84).