He states that the passiones anime (concepts/species) are signs of things, and such passiones are habits of the soul and species (representations/intentions) of the thing existing for the soul, and therefore, "they are offered only to the intellect so that they represent external things to that intellect" ([DS], 82).
"For nothing is placed in a category" as Aquinas says "unless it is something existing outside the soul" (De potentia, q. 7, a. 9).
In his commentary on the Categories, Paul explains that the direct and adequate objects of propositions, which make them true, are molecular things (res complexae) existing outside the soul.
Relational truth, unlike the first two veritates, is not an absolute property of things, but, just as its name suggests, a relation, and more precisely a relation of conformity which has its substrate of existence in our intellect, its fundamentum in mental sentences, and its terminus ad quem in the molecular objects existing outside the soul.
Aquinas maintains that the soul is capable of existing apart from the living body after the death of the body, because the soul is incorruptible.
The immortality of the soul seemed to presuppose that the mind or soul was capable of existing without the body and, for that reason, that it should be classified as an Aristotelian substance.
In the dualism of French philosopher René Descartes, both the mind and the soul are spiritual entities existing separately from the mechanical operations of the human body.
According to Albert, the essence of man is not the intellect.[8] With regard to the relationship between the soul and the body Albert appears to be torn between the Platonic theory which sees the soul as a form capable of existing independently of the body and the Aristotelian hylomorphic theory which reduces the soul to a functional relationship of the body.
So humans are not simply an immaterial idea, soul, spirit or 'thought' capable of existing independently of the body, yet are neither something which can be separated in essence from the rest of the natural world (Wójcik 2007).
But the Sophisma never uses the term 'esse in effectu,' preferring to speak of being in matter or in particulars, or outside the soul, when it wants to indicate existing particulars.
