But must the human mind conceive a possible essence as having _some_ ideal being _necessarily_? No; unless that mind has already convinced itself, from a study of _actual_ things, that an Eternal, Necessary, Omniscient Intelligence exists: to which, of course, such essences would be eternally and necessarily present as objects of thought. If the human mind had already reached this conviction it could then see that “even if there were no human intellect, things would still be true in relation to the Divine Intellect. But if both intellects were, _per impossibile_, conceived as non-existent truth would persist no longer.”(101) Suppose, therefore, that it has not yet reached this conviction, or abstracts altogether from the existence of God as known from _actual_ things; and then, further, imagines the actual things of its experience and all human intellects and finite intellects of whatsoever kind as non-existent: must it still conceive possible things as possible? No; possibility and impossibility, truth and falsity will now have ceased to have any meaning. After such attempted abstraction the mind would have before it only what Balmes describes as “the abyss of nothing”. And Balmes is right in saying that the mind is unable “to abstract all existence”. But the reason of the inability is not, as Balmes contends, because when it has removed actual things and finite minds there still remains in spite of it a system or order of possible essences which forces it to infer and posit the existence of an Eternal, Necessary Mind as the source and ground of that order. The reason rather is because the mind sees that the known _actual_ things, from which it got all its notions of possible essences, necessarily imply, as the only intelligible ground of their actuality, the existence of a Necessary Being, in whose Intelligence they must have been contained ideally, and in whose Omnipotence they must have been contained virtually, from all eternity. From contingent _actuality_, as known to it, the mind can argue to the eternal actuality of Necessary Being, and to the impossibility either of a state of absolute nothingness, or of an order of purely possible things apart from all actuality.