an accidental form, like the manufactured shapes of a ring, a dirham, a bed, and the like. In every such case both the matter and the form are a specific individual, and the matter that underlies an artificial form is something real; yet at root the form itself is an accident inhering in a body. The “matter” they attribute to any given body, however, is purely a construct of the imagination, just as the quiddity they assign to individual things and call “matter” is likewise imaginary. Here, then, “matter” is nothing more than the particular individuals themselves—truly existent, yes, but with no absolute reality beyond these concrete instances. The forms of bodies are certainly real, but there is no matter apart from the form upon which successive forms might alight. What they picture is only the alternation of definite union and separation, and that is simply the body itself, nothing else. Union and separation are accidents they have imagined—acts of coming together and parting. Their supposition that something other than the form disperses pertains only to bulk and absolute distance, whose existence is in the mind, not in external reality.

Fourth point: The terminology they use in this field—in logic, natural philosophy, astronomy, and the like—such as cause and effect, essence and quiddity, and even the word existence itself, is beset with ambiguity, confusion, and equivocation.

Most disagreements among rational thinkers arise from equivocal terms. They build their discourse on two pillars: first, the affirmation of two entities, and second, that one of them is the cause of the other. Thus they contend that if two necessary beings are posited, each must have that by which they agree—necessity of existence, for example—and that by which they differ, namely the quiddity proper to each. Then, if each is concomitant with the other, it would have to be the other’s effect. This would mean either that necessity of existence is itself caused by something else, or that one single cause has two distinct effects,