attributes belonging to entities. If they were such, there would be no commonality or universality in them, [for an existing attribute of the thing described is not shared by anything else. Others realized that every existent has an attribute peculiar to it and therefore said that there is no universality] (1) or commonality except in words, not in meanings.

The correct view is that these general matters in which there is commonality are established in the mind, and they are the meanings of general terms. Their universality is analogous to the universality of words: the written expression corresponds to the spoken term, the spoken term corresponds to the meaning, and the meaning is universal. The universality of the spoken term corresponds to the universality of the meaning, and the universality of the written expression corresponds to the universality of the spoken term.

People agree that universality is one of the properties of [words, but they have disagreed over whether it is also a property of meanings. Some said that it is also (2) one of the properties of] (3) meanings, as when they say, “widespread rain,” “prevailing justice,” and “general prosperity.”

Others said that this is merely figurative, because the rain that fell in this locality is not the very rain that fell in this locality; the same applies to prosperity and justice (4).

The correct view is that the meaning of rain present in the speaker’s mind is universal to precisely the same extent as the universality of (5) the term. Indeed, the term indicates that meaning. How, then, could the term be universal while its meaning—which is what the communication is intended to convey—is not? As for (6) meanings in external reality (7), there is no