  Importantly, these beings may be basic without being absolutely simple. After all, Socrates is made up of all manner of parts—arms and legs, organs and bones, molecules and atoms, and so on down. As a useful linguistic analogue, we may consider phonemes, which are basic, relative to the morphemes of a linguistic theory, and yet also complex, since they are made up of simpler sound components, which are irrelevant from the linguist’s point of view because of their lying beneath the level of semantic relevance. 