 Now, take proposal (b): namely, that distinctness consists in mutual exclusion. In treating distinctness as mutual exclusion, Śrīharṣa’s opponent essentially has said that to ascribe to an entity x the distinctness from y is to ascribe to x an absence of the property of being identical to y. But this raises a problem for his Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika opponent: by the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika philosopher’s own doctrine, the counter-positive (pratiyogin) of an absence—the entity that an absence is an absence of—must be ultimately real. For instance, according to the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika philosopher, it makes no sense to say that there is an absence of turtle-fur on the ground (since turtles don’t really have fur), but it does make sense to say that a turtle doesn’t have fur (since fur in fact does exist). So, if a cloth is to be characterized by the absence of the property of being identical to a pot, the cloth’s identity with the pot must be ultimately real. Once again, Śrīharṣa gets what he wanted: a perceptual awareness of the distinctness of a cloth from a pot would also reveal the identity between the pot and the cloth.