a specific name for the nobler kind in customary usage, while restricting the general term to the less excellent kind. Examples include “animal,” “beast,” “blood relatives,” “permissible,” “possible,” “allowable,” and other expressions. Thus, the terms “supposition” and “imagination” are often reserved for the deficient kind: what is false and has no reality. Whatever is imagined or supposed that is true, however, is given its specific designation: “true,” “truthful,” and the like, or “known” and “understood.” For when something is true, the heart comprehends it, and it thus becomes something understood, just as comparable things are understood. It may also be described as something conceived, remembered, and so forth.

This differs from the terms “knowledge,” “understanding,” and “sense perception,” which refer only to apprehension itself—that is, correct apprehension. The terms “imagining” and “supposing” do not denote apprehension itself. Rather, they denote a form of belief that sometimes corresponds to apprehension and sometimes concerns what is conceived, assembled, and generated within the mind, just as knowledge arises within it through reflection and inference. This latter kind may be true or false, just as the beliefs a person establishes in his mind through reflection and inference may be true or false. Such imagining and supposing include what a person sees in his dreams: it arises within his mind during sleep, even if he has not seen it with his own eyes through direct observation.

Since this is so, it is inappropriate to group the term “sense perception” with “supposition” and “imagination,” placing them on the same footing, and then say:

“One must acknowledge the existence of something contrary to the judgment of sense perception