Serge Thomas Bonino, "Aristotélisme et angélologie chez Saint Thomas d'Aquin," Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique 113, no. 1 (Janvier-Mars 2012): 32 (3-36).Presumably this, though condemned in 1277, is now an "approved thesis of Thomistic philosophy"?
Quantified matter is the principle of individuation, that is, of numerical distinction, which cannot exist in pure spirits, of one individual from another in the same specific nature.
Quantitate signata materia principium est individuationis, id est numericae distinctiones, quae in puris spiritibus esse non potest, unius individui ab alio in eadem natura specifica.DH 3611 (Decree of the Sacred Congregation of Studies, 27 July 1914). But see the note appended thereto in the Ignatius (or 43rd) edition of 2012, underscoring mine.
Thus, the number of human beings who have existed and will exist is dwarfed by the number of the species of angels who exist, as at ST I.50.3.Resp., underscoring mine:
the angels, even inasmuch as they are immaterial substances, exist in exceeding great number, far beyond all material multitude. This is what Dionysius says (Coel. Hier. xiv): 'There are many blessed armies of the heavenly intelligences, surpassing the weak and limited reckoning of our material numbers.' The reason whereof is this, because, since it is the perfection of the universe that God chiefly intends in the creation of things, the more perfect some things are, in so much greater an excess are they created by God. Now, as in bodies such excess is observed in regard to their magnitude, so in things incorporeal is it observed in regard to their multitude. We see, in fact, that incorruptible bodies, exceed corruptible bodies almost incomparably in magnitude; for the entire sphere of things active and passive is something very small in comparison with the heavenly bodies. Hence it is reasonable to conclude that the immaterial substances as it were incomparably exceed material substances as to multitude.
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