in one. To say this is almost immediately to prompt the question, ‘Which of these three seems to you the best?’ and the answer, ‘Understanding,’ is justified as follows: ‘because even a stone has existence and even an animal has life, but the stone is not alive and the animal does not think, so then if someone thinks, it is absolutely certain that he also exists and is alive’.62 Nothing is more fundamental in Augustine than the hierarchical character of the primary intuition about being—even if the