 Clearly the foundation of Fârâbî’s account of being is his distinction between being as the true and being as what is circumscribed by a quiddity outside the soul. It is not immediately obvious what he means by this distinction, and there is no obvious precedent, either in Greek or in Arabic, for his notion of “circumscription”. At first blush, “being outside the soul and in itself as it is in the soul” and “being circumscribed by some quiddity outside the soul” (or “having some quiddity outside the soul”) sound similar, although it is clear that Fârâbî wants them to be very different. We might guess that the main difference is something can have a quiddity outside the soul even if it is not represented in the soul (as Fârâbî notes p.116,7); and in this sense Fârâbî says that “whatever is true is also circumscribed by some quiddity outside the soul” (I,91 p.117,20). But the deeper difference is that while “being circumscribed by some quiddity outside the soul” is predicated of an external object, being in the sense of “true”, i.e., “being outside the soul as it is in the soul”, is predicated of something in the soul, and asserts that what is in the soul has something outside the soul corresponding to it. So in I,89, in discussing the kinds of existence [wujûd] corresponding to each sense of “being” [mawjûd], Fârâbî says that “the existence [wujûd] of what is true is a certain relation which  thoughts[24]  have to something outside the soul” (p.117,4–5). Fârâbî is explicit that being in the sense of “true” applies not only to the soul’s judgments but also to its concepts (I,88 p.116,3–5): to say of a concept that it “is” in the sense of “is true” is to say that it is instantiated. Fârâbî is apparently the first person to have said that existence, in one sense of existence, is a second-order predicate or second-order concept, a concept that is predicated only of concepts; but, unlike Frege, he understands concepts psychologistically, as mental  states.[25]