Riffing off of Mill

This is a return to Mill and the refinement of utilitarianism. Mill refines utilitarianism by introducing the quality of pleasures to the quantity of pleasures. He says that given two pleasures, the more valuable pleasure in terms of quality gets its qualitative value from the preference of it over any number of another pleasure, even if the qualitative pleasure comes with a greater amount of discontent. However I believe that this distinction is more blurry than when first apprehended. I think quality and quantity are not entirely separable concepts/terms and there is an interdependent relationship between the two. For example, take the most purely quantitative thing there is, say the number 23. The number 23 is an abstraction of 23 somethings, or 23 qualities. There could be 23 baseballs, cars, pies, whatever. Each one is a capacity, a quality. Now lets look at the quantity within quality. Take the color purple. The color could not exist without the right frequency of wavelengths of light. In addition, simply observe their linguistic structure. They both start with "qua". I also think there's evidence that Mill is implicitly aware of this relationship. On pg. 229-230, he says "Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decide preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure. If one of the two is, by those who are competently acquainted with both, placed so far above the other that they prefer it....". In actually making the distinction, he says "placed so far above it", implying a single spectrum of value, corresponding to one concept.