 The earliest Stoics do think they have gained something by this move, though. They appeal, unsurprisingly, to both genera and species in characterizing the methods of definition and division, which they take to be central to logic and reasoning. Far from being a blank nothing, these objects are distinguished from one another in terms of their common features and differences, as they would have to be for the classificatory system required for dialectic and science. The Stoics, moreover, explicitly quantify over these objects: there is, in fact, a distinct object of thought for each number (Plotinus Enneads 6.6.12.13–29). In referring to them as “apparitions” (phantasmata), moreover, the Stoics are not eliminating them. They are recognizing them as something that our mind is directed towards whenever something general “appears” to us or is represented (phantasia). For as we have seen, they hold that whatever appears to us is something, even if it is not something that exists or obtains. The natural move for the Stoics, then, would be to say that while Platonic forms aren’t anything at all – there are no such things – there are such things as ennoēmata; they just aren’t anything that is, that exists or obtains. And in fact a parallel report in Diogenes Laertius can be read in precisely this way: although an ennoēma is not anything that exists and so does not possess qualities, it is nevertheless “as if” it were something that exists and “as if” it possessed qualities, “like the impression of a horse when none is present” (Diogenes Laertius VII 61). In such a case, what I imagine is something and indeed something horse–like; but it is not a real horse or anything existent, and so on their view not something that can act or be acted upon and so not a body. It is merely an object of thought.