31. INDIVIDUALITY.—The distinction, therefore, between these grades of being in the individual, is a virtual distinction, _i.e._ a logical distinction with a ground for it in the reality. This is the sort of distinction which exists between the specific nature of the individual, _i.e._ what is contained in the definition of the lowest class to which it belongs, and its _individuality_, _i.e._ what constitutes its _nature or essence as an individual_. No doubt the concrete existing individual contains, besides its individual nature or essence, a variety of accidental characteristics which serve as marks or signs whereby its individuality _is revealed to us_. These are called “individualizing characteristics,” “_notae individuantes_,” the familiar scholastic list of them being “_forma_, _figura_, _locus_, _tempus_, _stirps_, _patria_, _nomen_,” with manifest reference to the individual “man”. But though these characteristics enable us to mark off the individual in space and time from other individuals of the same class, thus _revealing_ individuality to us in the concrete, it cannot be held that they constitute the individuality of the nature or substance in each case. If the human substance, essence, or nature, as found in Socrates, were held to differ from the human substance, essence, or nature, as found in Plato, only by the fact that in each it is affected by a different set of accidents, _i.e._ of modes accidental to the substance as found in each, then it would follow that this substance is not merely _conceptually_ identical in both, but that it is _really_ identical in both; which is the error of extreme realism. As a matter of fact it is the converse that is true: the sets of accidents are distinct because they affect individual substances already really and individually distinct.