  If judgments describe things and states of affairs and thus would give us access to reality by setting themselves over against that reality, we must step back, as it were, and consider a wider reality that includes judgments. In other words, we must place judgments that predicate universals of things into a wider field of predication, that is, in the “transcendental predicate” of consciousness. Here Nishida might have further developed a phenomenology of the agency of predication, but instead he moves to a more logical account of its scope and developed what he called a predicate logic.[3] He thinks of universals as fields of possibility that become specified or determined (more accurately, that determine themselves) in their particular instantiations. There is a necessary hierarchy of concreteness among universals that Nishida expresses as the order of topoi or places (basho). Most abstract are the universals that serve as predicates in particular judgments. Judging or predication in turn takes place in the topos of consciousness, which is further concretized as the universal or topos of reflexive self-awareness wherein acts of seeing, knowing, desiring and willing take place. And just as the world of self-awareness enfolds the world of nature described in judgments, it in turn is enfolded in the topos (Nishida calls it “the intelligible world”) within which the creative self pursues ideal values like truth, beauty and goodness. Here Nishida echoes the medieval, seemingly all-inclusive transcendentalia that transcend all categories. In his terms, all predication would be a mirroring of the transcendentals of being and of the one (unum), the true (verum), and the good (bonum). But those transcendentals, insofar as they themselves all elude predication, actually point to a more inclusive and undifferentiated topos, absolute nothingness.