 To understand further what universal concepts are, we need to know what Auriol thinks concepts in general are. Central to this is Auriol’s theory of apparent existence or esse apparens, that, at all levels, our cognitive faculties, in the very process of cognizing, put the object of cognition into a special type of existence, termed by Auriol “apparent existence” (esse apparens). For Auriol, in line with the general medieval view, our cognitive apparatus is divided into a sensory part (including the five external senses, the common sense, which puts the sense data from the five external senses together, and the imagination, which stores, retrieves, and sometimes manipulates the sense data, as well as sends them on to the intellect) and an intellectual part (including the agent and the possible intellect). According to Auriol, in any cognitive act — whether sensory or intellectual — the cognitive power puts the object of cognition into this special type of existence, and the object of cognition in this special type of existence is the object as perceived. Thus concepts as well as sensations are simply cognized things themselves in a type of existence different from that which they have in extra-mental reality. Auriol employs at least two different approaches to argue for this view: one based on intellectual cognition, the other based on sensory cognition. (Auriol’s trinitarian theology provides further arguments for this view; see Friedman 2013, esp. Ch. 9, section 4.) We’ll look at each of these in turn, in the process sketching what it was about the theory of esse apparens that made it quite radical and disturbing to Auriol’s medieval readers. (For the sake of precision, esse apparens will go untranslated hereafter.)