in the mind; yet they do not explain the matter that way. Instead, they imagine that the thing which exists outside the mind possesses an external essence distinct from the very existent in the external world—just as certain Muʿtazilites posited for a thing an external “subsistence” different from its concrete existence, maintaining that the existent is already subsisting outside before it actually comes into existence.

The error of those Muʿtazilites ⦗1⦘ is of the same species as the error of these philosophers. When the Muʿtazilites noticed that a thing can be mentally conceived so that one distinguishes between what is desired and what is disliked, what is commanded and what is forbidden—and since differentiation within sheer non-being is impossible—they said: the non-existent must be distinguished from other non-existents; differentiation cannot lie in pure nothingness, so the non-existent must have some kind of subsistence. As they could not ascribe actual existence to it outside the mind, they declared: “It subsists externally but does not exist,” thereby separating its subsistence from its existence just as the philosophers separate the external essence from the external existence.

All of this arose because one of the two terms had come to be dominated by the sense of mental subsistence, while the other had come to be dominated by the sense of external subsistence. They therefore assumed that the difference between the two indicated a difference in the realities signified, but that is not so. The only difference is that in one designation they considered mental being, and in the other they considered external being. Once the names are set aside and each thing is regarded with both its mental and its external being, they are all equivalent, equal, and inseparable. The subsistence of a thing in the intellect is its existence in the intellect, and its existence outside the mind is its subsistence outside the mind. Before it comes into existence it is non-existent externally, possessing neither subsistence nor existence, while in the intellect it has both subsistence and existence only in the sense that it is known, not that the very essence of the thing itself is present in the mind.