The vast majority, therefore, of those who reject the Thomistic doctrine on individuation, support the view that what individuates any nature or substance is simply the whole reality, the total entity, of the individual. This total entity of the individual, though really identical with the specific nature, must be conceived as something positive, superadded to the latter, for it involves a something which is logically or mentally distinct from the latter. This something is what we conceive as a _differentia individua_, after the analogy of the _differentia specifica_ which contracts the concept of the genus to that of the species; and by Scotists it has been termed “_haecceitas_” or “thisness”. Without using the Scotist terminology, most of those scholastics who reject the Thomist doctrine on this point advocate the present view. The individuality or “thisness” of the individual substance is regarded as having no special principle in the individual, other than the whole substantial entity of the latter. If the nature is simple it is of itself individual; if composite, the intrinsic principles from which it results—_i.e._ matter and form essentially united—suffice to individuate it. In this view, therefore, the material principle of any individual man, for example, is numerically and individually distinct from that of any other individual, _of itself_ and independently of its relation either to the formative principle or to quantity. The formative principle, too, is individuated _of itself_, and not by the material principle which is really distinct from it, or by its relation to this material principle. Likewise the union of both principles, which is a substantial mode of the composite substance, is individuated and rendered numerically distinct from all other unions of these two individual principles, not by either or both these, but by itself. And finally, the individual composite substance has its individuation from these two intrinsic principles thus individually united.