It is the capacity to form concepts and to abstract the mind's images ("species") from the objects perceived by sense; but since what the intellect abstracts from individual things is universal, the mind knows the universal primarily and directly and knows the singular only indirectly by virtue of a certain "reflexio" (cf. Scholasticism). As certain principles are immanent in the mind for its speculative activity, so also a "special disposition of works"—or the "synderesis" (rudiment of conscience)—is inborn in the "practical reason," affording the idea of the moral law of nature so important in medieval ethics.