 With this third category of reasons or concepts (rationes) of counting, similar to Boethius’s view of universals as real notions, Lefèvre can suggest that number has extramental reality in some sense. He affirms this point a few lines later, repeating the ancient view of number as multiples of the primordial “unity”. There is something shared between the unit “1” in the counting mind and the unit “1” of a single palm of counted length. This underlying shared unity indicates that “true numbers [i.e., 2, 3, etc.] are gathered and composed from units” in a way that belongs not merely to the mind or to the physical world (Unde fit ut non sola in mente sufficiat unitas ad numerandum, perinde ac unus palmus ad dimetiendum id quod etiam multorum fuerit palmorum, sed sunt veri numeri ex unitatibus coacervati compositique, 1503a: 27r).