At the same time it is true that we can understand these individual realities, interpret them, read the meaning of them, only by the intellectual function of judgment, _i.e._ by the analytic and synthetic activity whereby we abstract and universalize certain aspects of them, and use these aspects as predicates of the individuals. Now, seeing that intellectual thought, as distinct from sense experience, apprehends its objects only as abstract and potentially universal, only as static, self-identical, possible essences, and nevertheless predicates these of the concrete, individual, contingent, actually existing “things” of sense experience, identifying them with the latter in affirmative judgments; seeing moreover, that—since the intellectual knowledge we thus acquire about the data of sense experience is genuine and not chimerical—those “objects” of abstract thought must be likewise real, and must be really in those individual sense data (according to the theory of knowledge which finds its expression in Moderate Realism),—there arises immediately the problem, or rather the group of problems, regarding the relations between reality as revealed to intellect, _i.e._ as abstract and universal, and reality as revealed to sense, _i.e._ as concrete and individual. In other words, we have to inquire how we are to interpret intellectually the fact that reality, which as a possible essence is _universal_ for abstract thought, is nevertheless, as actually existing, _individualized_ for sense—and consequently for intellect reflecting on the data of sense.(142) 30. THE “METAPHYSICAL GRADES OF BEING” IN THE INDIVIDUAL.—What, then is the relation between all that intellect can apprehend in the individual, _viz._ its lowest class essence or specific nature, and its whole nature as an individual, its _essentia atoma_ or individual nature? We can best approach this problem by considering first these various abstract thought-objects which intellect can apprehend in the individual.