Now all these logical entities, or _objecta secundae intentionis mentis_, are relations established by the mind itself between its own thoughts; they have, no doubt, a foundation in the real objects of those thoughts as well as in the constitution and limitations of the mind itself; but they have themselves, and can have, no other being than that which they have as products of thought. Their sole being consists in _being thought of_. They are necessary creations or products of the thought-process as this goes on in the human mind. We see that it is only by means of these relations we can progress in understanding things. In the thought-process we cannot help bringing them to light—and thinking them after the manner of realities, _per modum entis_. Whatever we think we must think through the concept of “being”; whatever we conceive we must conceive as “being”; but on reflection we easily see that such entities as “nothingness,” “negation or absence or privation of being,” “universality,” “predicate”—and, in general, all relations established by our own thought between our own ideas representative of reality—can have themselves no reality proper, no actual or possible existence, other than that which they get from the mind in virtue of its making them objects of its own thought. Hence the scholastic definition of a logical entity or _ens rationis_ as “that which has objective being merely in the intellect”: “_illud quod habet esse objective tantum in intellectu, seu ... id quod a ratione excogitatur ut ens, cum tamen in se entitatem non habeat_”.(66) Of course the mental process by which we think such entities, the mental state in which they are held in consciousness, is just as real as any other mental process or state. But the entity which is thus held in consciousness has and can have no other reality than what it has by being an object of thought. And this precisely is what distinguishes it from _real being_, from _reality_; for the latter, besides the ideal existence it has in the mind which thinks of it, has, or at least can have, a real existence of its own, independently altogether of our thinking about it. We assume here, of course—what is established elsewhere, as against the subjective idealism of phenomenists and the objective idealism of Berkeley—that the _reality_ of _actual_ things does not consist in their being perceived or thought of, that their “_esse_” is not “_percipi_,” that they have a reality other than and independent of their actual presence to the thought of any human mind. And even purely possible things, even the creatures of our own fancy, the fictions of fable and romance, _could_, absolutely speaking and without any contradiction, have an existence in the actual order, in addition to the mental existence they receive from those who fancy them. Such entities, therefore, differ from _entia rationis_; they, too, are _real_ beings.