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PREFACE xxiii 

predicables: genus, species, difference, property, and accident. 
As such they are terms of discourse. In combination these make 
up a network of rationality by which entia naturae, beings of 
nature, are caught and expressed in the order of universals as 
univocal signs of many. Logic, strictly speaking, is the abstrac- 
tion and reflexive scrutiny of these modes of signification or 
terms of discourse. The second intention is the formal counter- 
part or analogue of a nature, an analytic composite which sup- 
plies the focus of analysis for synthetic natures. It is that by 
virtue of which what is known (the nature) is known. 2. In 
addition to the horizontal reference there is a vertical reference 
to the first intention which is an act of the mind signifying 
things themselves which are not signs of other things. Science 
deals with first intentions, but logic deals with second in- 
tentions. Herein lies the problem of the adequation or corn- 
mensuration of the intellect to the thing. 

Platonism is content to know the order of entia rationis, 
beings of the conceptual order, the ratios and sets of ratios, of 
formal reference in the horizontal plane. How these refer to 
entia naturae f beings of nature, namely, the individuated or 
terminated substance in nature remains a mystery. Platonism, 
then, stops short of the concrete universal or principle and is 
content to exploit the formal connectives of discourse at the 
expense of the terms connected. The Pythagorean reification of 
numbers, namely, that numbers are things, persists in the tradi- 
tion. Hence it is that Platonism studies mind as efficient cause 
primarily expressed in formal intuitions which furnish the ele- 
ments of structural forms. But the individuating cause in nature 
it fails to render intelligible. That anything is received into 
another thing according to the mode of the recipient remains in- 
explicable, but in Aristotelian abstraction the mode of the 
recipient is the crux of the doctrine. 

Abstraction explains the mode of recipiency in the order of