The second category consists of “inner perceptions,” such as each person’s awareness of his own hunger, pain, and pleasure. These are all particulars. Indeed, people do not share in perceiving each particular instance of these, as they may share in perceiving certain external objects, such as the sun and moon. Inner perceptions thus involve a particularity in both the perceiver and the perceived that external sense perceptions do not. Even if people share the same kinds of inner perception, these resemble judgments based on customary regularity. They have offered no proof that souls must be alike in these states, nor even that individual rational souls are alike.

The third category consists of “empirical judgments,” all of which are particular, since experience concerns only specific instances. The same applies to “judgments based on mass transmission,” for what is transmitted in this way is something known through sense perception, whether heard or seen. What is heard is a particular utterance, while what is seen is a particular body, color, action, or occurrence.

As for “intuitive judgments,” if they are regarded as yielding certainty, they are analogous to empirical judgments. The difference between them does not concern universality and particularity; rather, empirical judgments concern the actions of those conducting experiments, while intuitive judgments arise from their actions. Some people call both kinds experimental judgments.

They are therefore left with nothing but first principles, which are self-evident rational truths. Universal first principles are merely unqualified propositions concerning numbers, magnitudes, and the like—for example, “One is half of two,” and “Things equal to the same thing are equal to one another.” These are things posited in the mind; they do not exist as universals in external reality.