This is illustrated by an unrestricted obligation: a command concerning a universal essence, such as a command to free a slave. What is required is a slave without further specification. What is unrestricted can exist only as a particular, yet it is not specified in knowledge or intent. The command-giver has not intended any particular individual, although he knows that it can exist only as a particular, and that the absolute universal exists in people’s minds, not in concrete entities. What is an absolute universal in people’s minds exists among concrete entities only as something determinate, individual, and distinct. It is called universal only because it is universal in the mind; in external reality, nothing universal exists at all.
This principle is useful across the disciplines. We therefore mention it repeatedly in our discussions whenever it is needed, and it must be understood wherever its application is required, as explained previously. Errors concerning it have led various groups astray, even regarding the existence of the Lord, Most High. They have conceived of Him as absolute existence, either subject to the condition of absoluteness or without that condition. Neither can exist in external reality.
Among the adherents of philosophy, some maintain that the absolute exists in external reality subject to the condition of absoluteness, as is reported of Plato’s followers who affirm the Platonic Forms. Others claim that absolutes exist in external reality together with particulars, and that the absolute universal is a constituent of the individual particular. This is reported of those followers of Aristotle, the master of logic, to whom this view is attributed.
Both views are plainly mistaken. We know through sense perception and self-evident reason that external reality contains no determinate, particular thing that is entirely unshared. Rather, universal, general, absolute meanings in the mind are like unrestricted and general expressions in speech, and like the writing that signifies those expressions,