Supporters of this view not only admit but maintain that the entity of a real, existing accident is a “diminished” entity, inasmuch as it is dependent in a sense in which a really existing substance is not dependent. They simply deny the Thomist assertion that substantial and accidental principles cannot combine to form a real and natural unit, an individual being, if each be accorded an existence appropriate and proportionate to its partial essence; nor indeed can Thomists _prove_ this assertion. Moreover, if existence be not _really_ distinct from essence, there is no more inconvenience in the claim that partial existences can combine to form one complete existence, _unum esse_, than in the Thomist claim that partial essences, such as substantial and accidental constitutive principles, can combine to form one complete essence, one individual subject of existence. Then, furthermore, it is urged that the substance exists prior _in time_ to some of its accidents; that it is prior _in nature_ to its properties, which are understood to _proceed_ or _flow_ from it; and that therefore its existence cannot be theirs, any more than its essence can be theirs. Finally, it is pointed out that since existence is the actuality of essence, the existence which actualizes a substance cannot be identical with that which actualizes an accident. At all events, whether the one existence of the concrete individual substance as determined by its accidents be as it were a simple and indivisible existential act, which actualizes the composite individual subject, as Thomists hold, or whether it be a composite existential act, really identical with the composite individual subject, as in the other view,(263) this concrete existence of the individual is constantly varying with the variation of the accidents of the individual. This is equally true on either view.