abstract it completely from them. It does, however, abstract it from the aforementioned relation to which sensory perception was tied. As for the intellect, it can abstract the essence from the extraneous, individuating attributes surrounding it, firmly apprehending that essence, as though it had acted upon the object of sensation and made it intelligible.”

This may be challenged by saying:

It implies that universal abstraction by imagination is of the same kind as abstraction by the intellect. Yet what a person imagines is a likeness of the particular object perceived by the senses; no universal meaning has been abstracted from it at all. But if a form resembling it is imprinted within him, just as an image resembling a particular form is imprinted on a wall, he may then imagine the particular with all its attributes, or imagine some of them without others. He may also conceive of the individual itself while the form of its body is absent; what is conceived would then be its particular reality, such as the soul, rather than humanity in the abstract.

As for intellectual apprehension, it may mean apprehending a particular form. Insofar as this is a conception of a particular, it is of the same kind as imagination; insofar as it is not confined to a particular shape, it is of the same kind as intellectual conception.

Intellectual apprehension may also mean conceiving an unrestricted universal, such as the human being in the abstract. The reply is that the human being in the abstract may also be imagined in the abstract. Animals, too, can imagine universals. Thus, when they see barley, they long for it. Were there not in their imagination an unrestricted form corresponding to both this barley and that barley, they would not seek out this particular barley until they had tasted it,