The eighth argument:

The inner and outer senses furnish a conception of a thing’s real nature as such. Its universality or particularity, however, is a matter of intellectual judgment. The heart apprehends a meaning in one particular thing and a corresponding meaning in another, so that a general, shared meaning arises in the heart. This is its intellectual apprehension—that is, its apprehension of universal meanings.

When it apprehends the meaning of animality found in this animal and that animal, and the meaning of rationality found in this human being and that human being, which is distinctive to humans, it apprehends that the human species contains one meaning whose counterpart is found in other animals, and another meaning that has no counterpart in other animals. The first is called the genus, and the second the differentia; both are present in the species.

This is true. Yet this wording has taught it nothing that it did not already know through its intellect: that one meaning is common to humans and other animals—in the sense that what exists in one has a counterpart in the other, since universality does not exist in external particulars—while the other meaning is distinctive to humans.

Thus, there is no difference between saying, “The human being is a rational animal,” and saying, “The human being is the rational animal,” except in the comprehensiveness and exclusivity of the latter, not in forming a conception of