concrete entities are accompanied by intelligible substances corresponding to the universals predicated of them. Thus, they suppose that within a particular human being there is an intelligible human, an intelligible animal, an intelligible rational being, an intelligible sentient being, and an intelligible body. This is the essence to which existence accrues, and that essence is shared by all particular individuals. Such discourse impresses those who have neither understood it nor reflected upon it. Once someone understands its true nature, however, it becomes clear to him that it resembles the speech of madmen more than that of rational people, for it contradicts both sense perception and reason.

Their error arose from conceiving “absolute universals” in their minds and then supposing that these existed in external reality. Their error here is the reverse of their error concerning the prophets: the prophets witnessed things outside themselves, yet these heretics claimed that those things were within their minds. These heretics, meanwhile, perceived “absolute universals” within their own minds and supposed that they existed externally, although they existed only in their minds. Thus, they placed what was in their minds in external reality, where it did not exist, and placed what the prophets reported within the prophets’ minds, although it existed externally. Hence, they denied the unseen realities reported by the prophets.

They then held that the existence of the Lord—the Creator of the worlds, distinct from all His creatures—is of the same kind as the existence of humanity in human beings and animality in animals, or something similar, such as existence inhering in subsistence—according to those who say that the nonexistent is a thing. They wanted to make Him something existing within created beings while remaining other than them. Accordingly, they drew analogies for Him, sometimes with universals, sometimes with matter and form, and sometimes with existence as distinct from subsistence. When they likened Him to perceptible things, they likened Him to light in glass or air in a tuft of wool.