 Now, Pereira emphasized that all this is a process in which multiple instances can be differentiated only conceptually; there is a unique subject of this process: the entire soul, which first pays attention to an object and later constructs the notion of it. What is more, the attention of the soul is nothing other than the soul itself, which focuses on one object rather than on any other and does it spontaneously. In other words, its own attention is not accidental, but what Pereira himself called a mode of being: so, the act of knowing is not realiter anything other than the soul itself (AM: I.295). In this conception, the body does not participate in knowledge, nor is knowledge different from the soul (González Vila 1975: 28–29). It is likely that nominalism, during its ephemeral implantation in Spain in the first half of the sixteenth century, had a decisive influence on Pereira’s thought; he certainly aimed at contradicting the Realistic notion of St. Thomas about the soul, which assumed that the soul’s faculties are diversified by their acts and, in turn, their acts are diversified by their objects (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 77, a. 3). Against this conception, the Spanish author affirmed that the soul is always equivalent to its acts, so he ultimately criticized Aristotle for having turned to a group of differentiated faculties in his description of the cognitive process: such a plurality was unnecessary.