Almost everyone has heard that quantity sooner or later turns into quality. But what does this mean in reality? In general, how do qualitative changes differ from quantitative ones?
Quantitative changes
To sort everything out on the shelves, you must first define the basic concepts of "quantity" and "quality". It turns out that not everyone can formulate such simple things.
Quantity is a more or less clear category. It reflects the external relationship of objects or their parts. The number of fingers on the hand, the number of liters of water in the carafe, the number of atoms in a molecule … What will be the quantitative changes? It's very simple: a sprout appears from the ground, first it has two leaves, then three, four, ten, and so on. An increase in the snow layer on the visor of the house or a change in the number of seedlings in the garden can be considered a quantitative change.
Qualitative changes
Even the ancient Greek philosophers gave a definition to the concept of "quality". This is what characterizes any object and distinguishes it from another similar one. Thus, qualitative changes are changes in an object that have a direct impact on its properties or appearance. The group of qualitative changes can be attributed to the appearance of an additional pocket on the bag or a new asterisk on a military pursuit.
If a child has grown by 10 centimeters in a year, these changes can be safely considered qualitative. After all, he has changed outwardly - he has become much taller. Although, growth can also be attributed to quantitative changes, but if we consider it as a change in body length in centimeters. More centimeters - the change is evident! And here is the most interesting part of the question - the moment when some changes turn into others.
The transition from quantity to quality
As you think about examples of qualitative and quantitative change, you've probably already noticed that there is often a very fine line between the two. In the example with the child's height, extra centimeters can be interpreted in two ways. But this is not a matter of confusion of concepts. It's just that quantitative changes tend to gradually turn into qualitative ones. The child grows in height: one, two, three or five centimeters. But at the same time, he changes outwardly. Having become taller, the baby will no longer possess the same qualitative characteristics as before. It has changed, but these changes are the result of gradual growth and the accumulation of quantitative changes.
It is the same with a plant that stretches upward, gradually increasing the number of leaves. It would never occur to anyone to say that a sprout barely visible from the ground and a powerful stem with 15 large leaves are one and the same plant. Time passed, the number of cells, height, number of leaves changed. All this determined the changes in appearance, and hence qualitative characteristics.
