the speech inheres by His will and power; this is the position held by the Salaf and by the majority, so their assertion is invalid under every possible reading.

If, on the other hand, by calling them “substantial” they mean that these three are essential, constituent attributes while the rest are merely accidental—following the scheme of the Greek logicians who, with respect to a subject’s necessary qualities, separate one kind from another—then that view is flawed from several angles.

One of them is that the distinction such people draw among a subject’s necessary attributes—declaring some of them essential constituents that enter into its quiddity while labeling others as accidental adjuncts lying outside the quiddity—is rejected by the overwhelming majority of the world’s critical thinkers, both within the religious communities and beyond. This has been fully discussed in the refutation of those philosophers. It has become clear that their claim that species are compounded of genera and differentiae refers only to a mental composition that possesses no external reality, and that what exists in the mind varies according to the mind’s own conceptualization.

At times a person conceives of a thing in a summary fashion, and at other times in a detailed fashion. What they term “the complete quiddity,” “what is inside the quiddity,” and “what is outside it yet necessary to it” all, upon close examination, reduce to what the word denotes by direct signification, by implication, or by necessary entailment.

The meaning of a word depends on what the speaker intends, means, and conceives, and this differs according to people’s varying purposes; it does not revert to any objective rational reality or to some inherent essential property of existing things.

For this reason, since their discourse is unsound, they have been unable to provide a valid distinction between