 Still, despite the fact that it clearly has to do something with abstraction, an activity of the mind, Abelard insists that a status is not a concept of our mind. The reason for his insistence is that the status, being the common cause of imposition of a common name, must be something real, the existence of which is not dependent on the activity of our minds. A status is there in the nature of things, regardless of whether we form a mental act whereby we recognize it or not. In fact, for Abelard, a status is an object of the divine mind, whereby God preconceives the state of his creation from  eternity.[32]  A concept, or mental image of our mind, however, exists as the object of our mind only insofar as our mind performs the mental act whereby it forms this object. But this object, again, is not a thing, indeed, not any more than any other fictitious object of our minds. However, what distinguishes the universal concept from a merely fictitious object of our mind is that the former corresponds to a status of really existing singular things, whereas the latter does not have anything corresponding to it.