…for an attribute that inheres in its subject, or an accident that inheres in a substance, can never, under any consideration, be imagined to precede the thing to which it belongs; whenever any sort of precedence is posited—whether intellectual or otherwise—the essence is prior to the attributes.

As for mental conception, it admits of several levels: it may be summary or detailed. A person may have the notion of “man” occur to his mind without recalling any of man’s attributes; this is a summary conception. In that same act of thought he may also remember that man is “rational,” or perhaps that he is “laughing.” Likewise, when the idea of “animal” arises, he may call to mind that it is “sentient,” or that it is “self-moved by volition,” or that it “experiences pain and pleasure,” or that it “loves and hates.” And if one conceives of man as a “rational animal” without analyzing “animal” in detail, he has not yet formed a detailed conception of man. There is no necessary attribute that cannot be present in a detailed conception while being absent from a summary one.

Hence, when someone says: “An dhātī (essential attribute) is that without the prior conception of which the subject cannot be conceived,” if he claims this for every kind of conception, the assertion is false—and he himself admits its falsehood. For he says, “Your description of man as a rational animal is a complete definition that conveys the conception of his reality,” yet in uttering that definition he has not brought the essential attributes to mind in detail, for he has not recalled that “animal” means “a body that is sentient, growing, and self-moved by volition.” It is therefore established that, in their view, one may conceive the reality of man without summoning the essential attributes in full detail; the detailed conception of every essential attribute need not, then, come first.

With a summary conception, moreover, there is no requirement to recall any attribute at all. A summary conception of man is like a summary conception of animal. It is obvious that the described thing shares some attributes with others and differs from them in others. If one is not obliged to mention all the shared attributes in detail, to insist on mentioning some of them rather than others is sheer arbitrariness. And since, according to them, the reality of man is conceived without conceiving the common essential attributes in detail, it is clear that their claim that…