he should be asked:

“Do you mean the human being who exists externally—this individual or that individual—or the human being in the abstract, considered as such?”

If he means the former, he should be told:

“If you say of this human being, that human being, or any other, ‘He is composed of these two parts,’ you are told that ‘animal’ and ‘rational’ are two self-subsisting substances. Thus, if you say that they are two parts of the human being who exists externally, it follows that this externally existing human being contains two substances: one an animal, the other rational, both distinct from that particular human being. This is a willful denial of sensory evidence and reason.”

If he says, “I mean that the human being is described as an animal and as rational,” he should be told:

“This is a valid meaning. But calling attributes ‘parts’ and claiming that the subject possessing them is composed of them, that they precede it and are constitutive of it in both mental and external existence—just as the part precedes the whole and the simple precedes the composite—and similar claims they make in this matter are plainly known by reason to be false.”

If he says, “He is composed of animality and rationality,” he should be told:

“If by animality and rationality you mean ‘animal’ and ‘rational,’ the argument is the same. If you mean the two accidents inhering in the living, rational being—namely, its two attributes—your claim amounts to saying that the subject possessing these attributes is composed of them, that they are its parts, are constitutive of it, and precede it. Yet it is known that a substance is not composed of accidents, and that a subject’s attributes do not precede it in external existence.”