Full Idea
How could one avoid the inconsistency of saying that adjacent objects that can easily be separated are all the same united with each other, being coherent and never able o be separated from each other without division?
Gist of Idea
How is separateness possible, if separated things are always said to be united?
Source
comment on Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Alexander - On Mixture 2.2
A Reaction
In general my sympathies are with Alexander on this. If you abandon all principles of unity apart from unrestricted mereological composition, you save yourself a lot of bother, but you abandon the most useful concepts in ontology.
Book Reference
'The Stoics Reader', ed/tr. Inwood,B/Gerson,L.P. [Hackett 2008], p.96