  The tie between the intellect and the rest of Dietrich’s universe is thus very close. This explains why the treatise on the intellect and the intelligibles is of such importance in understanding his metaphysics and cosmology. The identity of ens reale and ens conceptionale is essential to the very nature of things as Dietrich understands them. Dietrich tells us in the De visione beatifica, that the distinction between conceptional and real being is the first division of being. Furthermore, conceptional being includes for Dietrich not just the objects of the intellectual act but the act itself. This act is not simply a reception or a reproduction in some fashion of an object coming to it from outside, but is what might be called semi-creative, that is, the act of the intellect is the act of conceiving its object. Intellectual conception is analogous to the conception of offspring by living things in the sense that a new reality is brought into being. Of course the intellective act is also reproductive, it does establish a mirror of external reality (the meaning of ens reale for Dietrich). Tétreau points out that ens conceptionale is really coextensive with the universe of beings because it exemplifies in itself all the modes of natural being. That is, intellect exhibits the distinctions of act and potency, oneness and multiplicity, cause and effect and so on. Furthermore, ens conceptionale forms a conceptional hierarchy of its own, a hierarchy which mirrors the greater one and at the same time causes and participates in it. At the bottom of this conceptional order are the external senses, followed by the interior senses, the discursive power, the possible intellect, and finally the agent intellect at the very top.