that are accidents requiring concrete entities in which to inhere, like the intellect present in our souls. As for establishing intellects that are self-subsisting substances, they have no evidence whatsoever for this.

Were this the place to discuss the matter at length, I would quote their very words so that what I have stated would become clear to you. But these people turn accidents into substances and substances into accidents, identifying the attribute with its subject and the subject with its attribute. They have built their arguments upon this, as they have explicitly stated in several places.

From this emerges:

[The sixth respect]

This man and others like him identify knowledge itself with the knower, and make knowledge itself a self-subsisting substance whose existence is necessary. This is sophistry of the grossest kind, far worse than what the Christians say.

What they claim to be entities separate from matter—namely, the intellects they posit as principles—amounts, at most, to universal knowledge, like the universal knowledge we possess. It is well known that universal knowledge can subsist only in a knower. But these people erred when their earlier thinkers, such as the followers of Plato, affirmed universals separate from concrete entities—the Platonic Forms—and held them to be without beginning or end, with change and transformation occurring only in their particular instances. When Aristotle and his followers recognized the falsity of this, they rejected it and said:

“Universals cannot