 The actual existence of things outside the soul is not always required for a (affirmative) proposition (here understood as a statement-making sentence) to be true (NLP II.7, 381). Nonbeing can be understood as being not yet actual but in potency only, that is, that has an aptitude to exist in  actuality.[24]  About those things that can but do not yet exist outside the soul, existence is taken to refer to the (common) nature and not to the individual (NLP II.7, 379): when animal is predicated of human being or when one says that an eclipse is the privation of light, it is not necessary to know whether or not this is actually the case because a human being is always an animal, and an eclipse cannot be but the privation of light. Thus, even if no human being actually existed outside the soul, even then the proposition ‘homo est animal’ would still be true (NLP II.7, 381).