Things that are equal to one and the same thing are equal to one another; contraries cannot coexist; contradictories can neither coexist nor both be absent, and so forth—propositions that are all universal in scope.
It is evident that when a person envisions a particular whole, or any of its parts, his awareness that this specific whole is greater than its part reaches his mind more quickly than the abstract thought that every whole is greater than its part. Instinctively he knows that his body is larger than his hand or his foot, that the sky is vaster than the stars contained within it, that a mountain exceeds any segment of itself, and that a city is greater than any quarter of it—long before he ever forms the comprehensive universal judgment that covers all such cases.
Likewise, as soon as he conceives of a particular object, he knows it cannot both exist and not exist at the same moment, prior to grasping the general rule that two contradictories cannot coincide. When he imagines a specific shade of black, he already understands that one and the same color cannot be both black and white before he extrapolates the broader maxim that two contraries cannot coexist. Countless examples could be given.
If someone argues that the universal proposition is deposited in the mind necessarily—self-evidently bestowed by the Giver of intellect—we reply that the arrival of the corresponding particular proposition in the mind, by that same divine bestowal, is even more immediate.
The Vast Difference between Affirming the Lord through Signs and Affirming Him by Demonstrative Syllogism
It is known that every contingent being—everything other than God—entails the very Essence of the Lord, exalted is He; its existence is impossible without the existence of His sanctified Essence. Although each contingent being also entails certain universals that it shares with other things, this is only because the existence of any given entity necessitates the existence of its concomitants, and those shared universals are themselves among the concomitants of the particular. That is, each individual entails what specifically belongs to it of the overarching universal, while the shared universal accompanies it on the condition that the particular exists and that there be a conscious knower who can conceive the point of commonality.
He—glorified be He—knows things exactly as they are: He knows His sanctified Self in the manner that is unique to Him, and He knows universals precisely as universals. Consequently, from the existence of the particular there necessarily follows the existence of the universal.