 Boethius rejects this suggestion on the ground that whenever there are several generically similar entities, they have to have a genus; therefore, just as the individual animals had to have a genus, so too, their individual animalities would have to have another one. However, since the genus of animalities cannot be one entity, some ‘super-animality’ (for the same reason that the genus of animals could not be one entity, on the basis of the previous argument), it seems that the genus of animalities would have to be a number of further ‘super-animalities’. But then again, the same line of reasoning should apply to these ‘super-animalities’, giving rise to a number of ‘super-super-animalities’, and so on to infinity, which is absurd. Therefore, we cannot regard the genus as some real being even in the form of [a collection of] several distinct entities. Since similar reasonings would apply to the other Porphyrian predicables as well, no universal can exist in this way.