and likewise, division into two categories is a rational judgment. Similarly, the necessity of possessing one of the two attributes, without specifying which, is a rational judgment, not a sensory one. If reason makes this judgment merely upon knowing that a thing—whether co-located or spatially separate—exists, before knowing that it has been brought into existence, then knowledge of this rational division clearly does not depend upon judging the thing to have been brought into existence. Rather, this division is known simply by knowing that the thing exists.

If what necessitated this division were not existence, but rather origination or something conditional upon origination, then affirming this division without knowing what necessitates and entails it would be a judgment made by the mind without proof. For a thing is inferred only from its cause or its effect, or one of two effects is inferred from the other. When all these forms of evidence are absent, knowledge is absent. Thus, if knowledge of this division exists without these forms of evidence, it follows that they are not the grounds for that knowledge and therefore do not enter into its explanation.

Likewise, his statement, “What is known self-evidently cannot be the cause of a property established through inference,” applies only to the cause that necessitates knowledge of the judgment. Yet what produces an effect in something perceived by the senses may be something not