such as will, love, hatred, anger, and pleasure—can be general or particular just as speech can. It is only in the case of realities outside the mind, existing in external reality—as when people speak of “widespread rain” and “widespread abundance”—that people have disputed whether describing them as general is literal or figurative. There are two views:

• (One view is that it is figurative, because each portion of rain or abundance occurs only where the other occurs, so there is no generality here. The other view is that it is literal, because rain, considered absolutely, has extended over the whole area.

As for particularity, it applies to realities when they exist externally, since everything has an essence and an individual identity peculiar to it, distinguishing it from anything else. I mean its concrete, individual reality, in which nothing else shares—for example, this man, this grain, and this dirham. Whatever applies to these realities externally also applies to them in the mind. Mental conception has a broader scope than external realities, encompassing what exists, what does not exist, what is impossible, and what is hypothetical.

As for absoluteness, it undoubtedly applies to realities when they are in the mind, for the intellect conceives an absolute human being and absolute existence. But can anything absolute be conceived as existing externally? There are two views on this. One holds that the absolute exists externally because it forms part of the determinate. The other holds that it has no external existence, since only determinate, qualified things exist externally, and the absolute that several things share cannot form part of a determinate thing that is not itself shared.

The precise account is that the absolute, without any condition whatsoever, includes the qualified, determinate thing. As for the absolute