namely, what corresponds to them has now come into existence.

Once this is understood, every object of knowledge is grasped through a specific, determinate act of knowing. In that determinate knowledge there is only a share of the general, absolute knowledge; the absolute, all-embracing knowledge does not reside in it as such. When a person conceives of this particular man, this act of knowing, or this report, he conceives it not as something absolute and general, but as something definite and particular.

This in no way entails that he must know a delimited universal—comprehensive of all its instances yet exclusive of anything else. Thus, when something other than knowledge is said to depend upon the acquisition of knowledge, what it really depends on is the acquisition of a specific, individual act of knowing, not on the conception of knowledge in its universal sense, as stated in the first reply.

Even if it were claimed that it also depends on such a conception, it would depend only on conceiving a particular, determinate entity, not on conceiving the unrestricted, comprehensive universal. For the existence of knowledge of any given thing is not contingent upon conceiving that comprehensive universal, nor upon its external existence, nor upon imagining it. Therefore, knowing anything whatsoever does not depend either on the limited entity itself—namely, the comprehensive, exclusive knowledge—or on its definition, which is knowledge of that comprehensive universal; it relies on neither its conception nor its existence.

The same holds for their attempt to establish the validity of reasoning by means of reasoning. The soundness of the genus “reasoning” is recognized through a particular act of reasoning whose soundness is self-evident. Here, the proof is a specific instance of reasoning, while the thing proven is the general category of reasoning, and the correctness of that particular reasoning is known by necessity.

So too with many other conceptions and judgments: the particular instance is known necessarily, and through it the genus is recognized; this is not a case of defining a thing by itself.

Accordingly, if one claims that these matters are delimited by possible definitions, devastating objections that undermine their basic principle arise against him—and if one claims that they are not in need of definition, the same objections arise.