 His view is, then, nominalistic. Since, however, the word ‘nominalist’ is used in different ways by different philosophers, and is, indeed, used rather austerely by some of the philosophers with whom Suárez was acquainted, we should specify precisely his variety of nominalism, in a single sentence: a universal is a being of reason (an ens rationis), properly regarded as an extrinsic denomination grounded in the intrinsic individual formal unities of mind- and language-independent things (res), as mediated by non-formally representing intelligible species related to their objects predicatively by some manner of analogy of attribution. That the representations are non-formal is, in this context, just to say that they represent their objects not as universals, but as individuals regarded as being the same, which manner of regarding them is grounded in a real fact about them, namely that they are objectively similar.[11] 