  In response to the same tension that motivated Aquinas to give more emphasis to the intellect in the definition of transcendental truth, the transcendental true was advanced to claim conceptual precedence before and hence challenge the conceptual priority of the concept of being. Potencies are specified by the formal aspect under which they conceive things and the intellect is distinguished from the will, since the formal object of the former is the true, the formal object of the latter is the good. On account of ‘the objective turn’, the identification of the first known with the proper object, it is clear, therefore, that the true is in a sense the first known, as the formal aspect under which everything is understood by the intellect. Henry of Ghent is the main representative of this much-discussed position. He distinguishes between the true as what is ‘dispositively’ first known, in the sense of what is conditional for knowledge, and being as what is ‘objectively’ first known. This distinction respects the difference between direct and reflective cognition, but also shows the vulnerability of the medieval foundation of the priority of the concept of being. It might be taken as another example of the basic instability that underlies the doctrines of the transcendentals: the non-identity of the first object of the intellect and the subject of metaphysics.