Scotus and his followers go even farther than the advocates of this intrinsic virtual distinction by maintaining the existence of a distinction which on the one hand they hold to be less than real because it is not between “thing and thing,” and on the other hand to be more than logical or virtual, because it _actually_ exists between the various thought-objects or “_formalitates_” (such, _e.g._ as animality and rationality) in the individual, independently of the analytic activity whereby the mind detects these in the latter. This distinction Scotists call a “formal distinction, actual on the part of the thing”—“_distinctio formalis_, _actualis ex natura rei_.” Hence the name “formalists” applied to Scotists, from their advocacy of this “Scotistic” distinction. It is, they explain, a distinction not between “things” (“_res_”) but between “formalities” (“_formalitates_”). By “thing” as opposed to “formality” they mean not merely the individual, but also any positive thought-object which, though it may not be capable of existing apart, can really appear in, or disappear from, a thing which can so exist: for instance, the essential factors of a really composite essence, its accidental modes, and its real relations. By “formality” they mean a positive thought-object which is absolutely inseparable from the thing in which it is apprehended, which cannot exist without the thing, nor the thing without it: for instance, all the metaphysical grades of being in an individual, such as substantiality, corporeity, life, animality, rationality, individuality, in an individual man. The distinction is called “formal” because it is between such “formalities”—each of which is the positive term of a separate concept of the individual. It is called “_actual_ on the side of the thing” because it is claimed to be _actually_ in the latter apart from our mental apprehension of the individual. What has chiefly influenced Scotists in claiming this distinction to be thus _actually_ in the individual, independently of our mental activity, is the consideration that these metaphysical grades are grounds on which we can predicate contradictory attributes of the same individual, _e.g._ of an individual man that “he is similar to a horse” and that “he is not similar to a horse”: whence they infer that in order to avoid violation of the principle of contradiction, we must suppose these grounds to be _actually_ distinct in the thing.