They divide the universal (kullī) into three kinds: natural, logical, and intellectual.

1. The first is the absolute taken with no condition whatsoever—such as “man” or “body” grasped in pure abstraction, without any positive or negative qualification. One therefore does not ascribe to it being one or many, existent or non-existent, or any other sort of predicate.

2. The second is that same quiddity insofar as it is described as “universal,” “common,” and the like; this is the logical universal.

3. The third unites the two: the universal together with its characterization as universal and common; this is the intellectual universal.

According to them, the last two exist only in the mind—except for those who affirm the Platonic Forms. As for the first, they claim that it does exist outside the mind. A careful examination, however, shows that it does not exist as a universal; it exists only as a particular, and this particularization does not contradict it. The concept is predicable of the particular and the non-particular, of what is mental and what is external. What is established is merely its external existence as a particular, whereas its universality is something the mind alone conceives and posits. It is called “universal” only because it encompasses its particulars and is common to them, just as a word is called “general” because it is general with respect to the individuals it signifies. Otherwise, in itself it is a determinate entity subsisting in a determinate locus, a particular in virtue of its own essence—just as a general term, considered in itself and in the place where it is uttered, is a single, definite word.

Once this distinction is observed, the difficulty that confused al-Rāzī and the like is removed. What matters here is that the absolute, on the condition of being unconditioned