and the particular report. A person may also conceive of something in absolute terms—such as the absolute human being, absolute knowledge, or an absolute report. This “absolute” can be viewed in two ways.

One may mean the absolute on the condition that it remain absolute; this is what is called the intelligible universal. Or one may intend the absolute without any condition whatsoever, and this is what they term the natural universal.

There is disagreement over whether this unconditional natural universal exists outside the mind. The correct view is that it does exist externally, but only as a concrete, determinate instance: in the external world there is nothing but a particular human being endowed with a specific animality and a specific rationality, and likewise only a particular act of knowing and a particular report.

Accordingly, some thinkers claim that the absolute is a component of the determinate, and that the universal is part of the particular. Their reasoning is that wherever this individual human or this individual animal exists, the meanings “human” and “animal” are also present, and these meanings are the universals.

Others reject this view. They argue that an absolute universal is that whose conception does not preclude many individuals from falling under it, whereas a determinate entity is a particular whose very conception prevents such participation. How, they ask, can the greater be part of the lesser? How can the universal or absolute—which embraces, or at least could embrace, many individuals—be merely a component of a determinate particular that applies only to one concrete individual in the external world?

The decisive answer is that outside the mind only particular, determinate entities exist; nothing exists externally as a universal while remaining universal. When a specific individual is present, the humanity and animality it possesses are themselves specific and restricted, neither universal nor absolute.

Therefore, when it is said that the absolute is part of the determinate, this is true only on condition that it not be taken as universally absolute. What the intellect apprehends as universally absolute does indeed exist externally, but it exists only in a restricted, particularized form.

This is akin to saying, “What I had in my mind has now taken place,” or “I have carried out what I conceived.” The meaning is that the mental images have come to exist in the external world, i.e.,