Such a dictate has no support whatsoever—neither in concrete reality nor in the innate human disposition.

All the more striking is that they maintain the “essential” precedes the quiddity both in the mind and in the external world, calling it the constitutive part of the quiddity. They argue that the parts of the quiddity are prior to it in conception and in existence, for the quiddity is compounded of them, and every composite, they say, must be preceded by its simple constituents.

Yet it is self-evident that a subject’s attributes inhere in it and therefore cannot precede it in external existence. Their labeling an attribute a “part” stems only from the fact that it appears as a part in mental conception and in speech. When you describe something as “a body that is sentient, living, voluntarily mobile, and rational,” the whole phrase—both its wording and its meaning—is formed from those individual words and the concepts they convey, and these are indeed parts of that linguistic compound.

This merely confirms our earlier point: the entity they call the “quiddity,” its internal constituent, and its external concomitant all revert to mental notions. The term denotes the first by direct signification, the second by inclusion, and the third—the necessary concomitant—by implication.

At times they claim that the essential precedes the quiddity, and at other times that it “is not posterior” to it, treating the two statements as different. In fact they overlap, for whatever is truly prior to something cannot, by definition, be subsequent to it.

Second point: An attribute’s being essential to its subject depends on the objective reality that makes it so, whether or not our minds apprehend it. If one of two attributes is essential and the other is not, there must be between them a difference grounded in their mind-independent reality. To assert that the distinction among external realities is nothing more than priority or posteriority in the intellect would be true only if “reality” and “quiddity” were no more than mental fabrications with no external existence. In that case everything would hinge on the thinker’s private stipulation, and the discussion would dissolve into notions conjured up in the mind—mere fancies and false imaginings. Such confusions are rife in their theoretical system, as we have shown elsewhere concerning their talk of prime matter, separate intellects, quiddities, and similar topics.