Aquinas's Transcendentals

The transcendentals are features of being common to all individual substances and common to all categorical modes of being. They transcend any one genus of being and therefore have to be denoted analogically. Everything we encounter is in some way real, ontologically. We ascribe them to everything that exists. This way of thinking opens us up to the study of the transcendentals - a key topic of medieval western metaphysics.