is either said to exist externally or is not said to exist externally. Some maintain that abstract essences exist separately from individual entities, as do those who affirm Platonic Forms.

Others maintain that these essences exist together with particular entities and that the absolute is part of the particular. They say that the absolute taken without any condition exists externally, whereas the absolute subject to the condition of absoluteness does not exist externally. They call the absolute taken without any condition the natural universal; the absolute subject to the condition of absoluteness is the intellectual universal; and its being universal and absolute constitutes the logical universal. For, in their view, the intellect is composed of the natural and the logical. Thus, one says that the human being considered as such—with all its qualifications disregarded—is the natural universal; its being general, universal, and absolute constitutes the logical universal; and the combination of the two is the intellectual universal.

Still others say that nothing existing externally is universal at all: only particular, specific things exist externally. Yet what is universal in the soul exists externally, though only as something particular.

Accordingly, if it is said that the natural universal exists externally, meaning that the nature which the intellect abstracts as a universal exists externally, but only in a particular form, then this is correct.

But if it is said that the universal nature exists externally while remaining universal; or that the universal, whose conception does not preclude its being shared by multiple individuals, is part of the particular, whose conception does preclude its being shared by multiple individuals; or that this particular human being is composed of two substances, one animal and the other rational, or of two accidents, animality and rationality; or if similar claims are made—then all of this