 Indeed, this analogy also shows why this conception should be so appealing from the point of view of the original epistemological problem of the possibility of universal knowledge, without entailing the ontological problems of naïve Platonism. For just as we do not need to read all copies of the same book in order to know what we can find on the same page in the next copy (provided it is not a corrupt  copy),[38]  so we can know what may apply to all singulars of the same nature without having to experience them all. Still, we need not assume that we can have this knowledge only if we can get somehow in a mysterious contact with the universal nature over and above the singulars; all we need is to learn how “to read” the singulars in our experience to discern the “common message”, the universal nature, informing them all, uniformly, yet in their distinct singularity. (Note that “reading the singulars” is not a mere metaphor: this is precisely what geneticists are quite literally doing in the process of gene sequencing, for instance, in the human genome project.) Therefore, the same nature is not the same in the same way as the same individual having this nature is the same as long as it exists. For that same nature, insofar as it is regarded as the same, does not even exist at all; it is said to be the same only insofar as it is recognizable as the same, if we disregard everything that distinguishes its instances in several singulars. (Note here that whoever would want to deny such a recognizable sameness in and across several singulars would have to deny that he is able to recognize the same words or the same letters in various sentences; so such a person would not be able to read, write, or even to speak, or understand human speech. But then we shouldn’t really worry about such a person in a philosophical debate.)