 As well as explicitly distinguishing categories of meanings from categories of the correlated objects that could possibly be ‘meant’, Husserl introduced a second innovation to the study of categories by distinguishing highest formal essences (which Husserl calls ‘categories’) from highest material essences (which he calls ‘regions’) (1913 [1962], §10; cf. Smith 1995, 329–330 and Smith 2007, 142–148). Thus far I have been describing the formal ontological categories, the correlates of the different meaning categories distinguishable by the nonsense test. In fact, Husserl reserves the term ‘category’ for the highest formal genera, which are distinguished by a process of formalization – a removal of content. These ‘categorial essences’ begin with ‘object in general’ at the top of the tree, which is then divided at the next level into categories including (as examples) object, state of affairs, property, relation, number, etc. (compare lists 1913 [2000], 237 and 1913 [1962], 61). Much as Aristotle distinguished (independent) primary substances from (dependent) things of other kinds, within his formal categories Husserl distinguishes the ‘substrative’ category of individuals (or, more properly, the mere this-there) from the dependent ‘syntactic objectivities’ – the correlates of nominative terms that are derived from ways in which we speak about the primary substances (1913 [1962], 62–3 and 67) (as, e.g., the nominative term ‘this relation of brightness’ may be derived from claims that ‘A is brighter than B’ (1913 [2000], 797–8)).