Flowers contain honey. Butterflies, ants, bees, mosquitoes, and other insects may light upon the flower, but only bees can abstract the honey, for only bees have the power to do so.

As the bee abstracts honey from the flowers and ignores everything else in them, so the intellect abstracts from the phantasms of similar objects the essence of that which is common and necessary to them and ignores everything else, namely, the individual differences.