such as co-owners sharing real estate, with one owning a portion and another owning a portion, whether held jointly or separately. When they divide it, each receives a portion. What is divided cannot be predicated of either portion and does not apply to both. This is sharing in a whole and dividing that whole into its parts, as in the division discussed by jurists in their books, and the Prophet’s division of war booty and inheritances—may Allah bless him and grant him peace.

The division of speech into nouns, verbs, and particles is another example.

It is evident that individual entities sharing f in a species or genus, and the division of genera into species and individuals, are not of this kind. Rather, this is the division of a universal into its particulars, and the particulars’ sharing in a universal that encompasses them. Universals do not exist in external reality as universals; they can exist only as individuated, determinate particulars.

If someone says, “The natural universal exists in external reality; it is the unqualified, taken without any condition, such as the human being considered simply as such, or the animal considered simply as such,” then, if he means that there exists something to which the meaning described as universal when it is in the mind applies—for example, an individual described as a human being, an animal, a body, or the like—he is correct. But if he means that the universal exists as a universal, he is mistaken. The conception of a universal does not preclude its being shared, whereas the conception of a determinate individual does preclude its being shared. How, then, can the former be a part of the latter, confined within it, when it can encompass many times as many individual entities? How can the large be a part of what is not small, and the great a part of the small?

There is no doubt that the mind conceives of an unqualified human being, whose conception does not preclude the possibility of