  Avicenna here describes the process of abstraction, or how the representation in the imagination of particular things becomes universal in the intellect. The universal forms are abstracted from representations in the imagination and flow from the active intellect into the passive. Note, however, that the terminology of representation is never used in relation to the intellect. It is always the internal senses that represent in Avicenna and not the intellect or the external senses (see Lagerlund 2007b, for a table of the whole range of terms translated by ‘representation’ in Avicenna’s works.)