 What characterizes Burley’s opinion on essence in the period 1300–23 seems to be the acceptance of the Averroistic thesis of the identification of the forma totius with the forma partis. It is evident that in the human composite the essence is nothing but the intellective soul which informs the body. This choice allows Burley to justify the interpretation of the relation between predicate and subject of an essential predication in terms of identity, and gives him a strong criterion for distinguishing substantial from accidental forms. Furthermore, it also allows him to have an ontology rather lacking in kinds of entities: he admits the extramental existence of secondary substances, and so the extramental existence of substantial essences, but even if they are real from a certain point of view, absolutely considered (namely, from the point of view of their being) such essences have to be identified with the substantial forms which constitute the substantial composites. As a consequence, the macro-objects (or obiecta sensus) are aggregates made up by singular matter and (substantial) form and a congeries of singular accidental forms inhering in the composite of matter and form -- a description of the (metaphysical) structure of things with which even a nominalist could have agreed. Yet, for Burley, the substantial form displays and transmits to the composite its own genetic inheritance (so to speak), namely the string of (real) properties (the specific differences) which give rise to that substantial form from the generic and simple property of being-a-substance. And so, if considered from the point of view of its “genetic inheritance”, the form is the essence, or forma totius, of the composite, and, as such, somehow differs from itself viewed as forma partis of the composite. 