 In the De anima commentary, this remark did not prevent Burley from stating the exact opposite of what he intends to prove here. He had held that the (material) intellect does not know singulars through universal species, but through the intentional representation of a given singular present in the elementary thought and accessible to the intellect only at the moment of the active union of a single individual man with the material and active intellects in the soul. This means that the complex explanation of the process and nature of human knowledge developed in the De anima commentary is completely rejected here, and replaced by a new theory modelled not on Averroes’s commentary but on Burley’s own semantic and ontological program. What is more, in Burley’s new way of thinking, the intellect does know the universal only by abstraction from singulars; but abstraction always proceeds from what is already known to what is not yet known; therefore, singulars are known by us before universals (cf. fol. 11va). It is thus not surprising that Burley concludes this first part of his answer, devoted to confused knowledge, by supporting a thesis diametrically opposed to what was proposed in his De anima commentary, namely that universals are known by the intellect indirectly and derivatively, through reflection. According to Burley, our intellect grasps what is universal only after having known at least one of the corresponding singulars, even though it knows the lowest species of each singular almost immediately, from the singular itself, whereas all the other universals contained in the lowest species (from the proximate genus up to the highest genus in the category to which the singular thing belongs) are known only through reflection on the lowest species itself. The most immediate consequences of the adoption of this view are (1) a new theory concerning the object of intellective knowledge, different from that presented in Book III of his De anima commentary; and (2) a new definition of the function of the active intellect in the process of knowledge.