nevertheless the mind goes on to posit entities that are intrinsically impossible and can never obtain in the external world. The absolute version of any such impossibility—whether an absolute man, an absolute animal, absolute existence, or anything else—is, by its very nature, even less capable of external realization. Indeed, “absolute existence on the condition of absoluteness” is the most impossible of all: it would have to be an existence that is neither self-subsistent nor dependent on anything else, neither eternal nor originated, neither substance nor accident, neither necessary nor contingent. Plainly, the occurrence of such a thing outside the mind is inconceivable.