 Keeping these distinctions in mind, we can now move on to examine how Burley articulates his solution to the problem of the object of human knowledge. According to him, determining whether what is more universal is known by us before what is less universal is equivalent to establishing what is the primary and direct object by origin of confused and appropriate cognitions. He thinks that from the point of view of the origin of our confused knowledge, the intellect grasps first what is singular. The argumentation he develops to support this claim is articulated in two stages: (1) he demonstrates that the intellect is able to know what is singular, since it can easily distinguish universals from singulars. If the intellect were unable to know singulars, it would be impossible for it to distinguish what is universal from what is singular. This was the most important proof that he had utilized in his De anima commentary to demonstrate that the material intellect has some kind of singular knowledge, however indirect and derivative. Next, (2) he proves that the primary object by way of generation (via generationis) of confused knowledge is the singular, as it would be otherwise impossible to explain how the intellect can obtain some kind of singular knowledge on the basis of previous universal knowledge. If we knew what is universal before what is singular, we could never acquire knowledge of any singular, given that the universal species cannot direct our intellect toward any particular individual, since it is tied to each individual by the same relation of similarity (fol. 11rb). 