  Intellect gives rise to an order of emanation that is just as vast as that of the creative emanation of God in the order of real beings.  In fact intellect mirrors this order perfectly. It is itself identified with the universe of beings. Furthermore, it is like God’s creativity in that it does not depend upon a pre-existing material substratum from which ideas are formed by abstraction. But it does depend upon God having made it the kind of being that in the order of understanding, the ens conceptionale, is able to “conceive” being. For no other being except God can do this.