or particular number, unlike prayer and the like. This is a point at which minds fall into error, confusing what the mind derives from realities existing externally with those realities themselves. Similarly, some people mistakenly imagine that universal, unrestricted mental forms exist externally, coming to believe that those very forms exist in external reality. Thus, knowledge of realities and knowledge of their number, time, and place are all closely related.

There is no doubt that realities exist in themselves and are inherently distinct from one another through the attributes subsisting in them and the spatial location, time, and number that follow from these. These things are not substances and accidents separate from those realities. Rather, they are sometimes relations between those realities and other things, intelligible only by considering the two related things. Hence people frequently dispute whether such things have positive existence or are merely absences.

In any case, saying that every time requires another time, and every spatial location another spatial location, is equivalent to saying that every number requires another number, or that every self-subsisting reality requires another self-subsisting reality. Further clarification may also be offered by saying to him: the statement, “Then we concluded