 Once the soul has known its own affection, it is able to reflect on itself and discover itself as existing. This is a single process in which two moments must be distinguished: in the first act the soul knows the fact of being affected by something, whereas only in the second does it know itself as an independent entity, with autonomous existence. Now, the immediacy with which the soul reaches the consciousness of this existence shows that for Gómez Pereira this is not a deductive development, but a pure intuitive act that has a previous formal factor: the awareness of the affection is, in effect, “quodam antecedens cognitum” necessary to verify that the soul “seipsam noscit”.