—one which they regarded as a “dimension” that exists as a pure, abstract substance, namely al-khalaʾ (the void); a second, a substance that subsists by itself, namely al-dahr (eternal time); and a third, likewise disembodied and self-subsisting, namely al-māddah and al-hayūlā, the primordial, eternal matter.

All of these, however, exist only as mental concepts, not as concrete realities; indeed, even the ten separate intellects they affirmed ultimately reduce, upon close examination, to abstractions fabricated by the mind itself rather than to entities that exist outside it.

Their very notion of “immaterial, separate substances” is borrowed from the soul’s separation from the body at death—and that point is true, for the prophets, their followers, and the overwhelming majority of rational people agree that the spirit departs from the body and endures after that separation. Anyone among the speculative theologians of the various religions who maintains that no soul remains after the body, that the spirit is merely a part of the body or one of its accidents, is not only at odds with plain reason but also in conflict with God’s revealed Books, His messengers, and all who have followed them in every religious tradition. A detailed discussion of this lies elsewhere.

Our purpose here is simply to note that when these Greeks classified the inseparable attributes of a subject, they divided them into essential attributes and accidental yet necessary attributes, and then held that some of those necessities belong to the very quiddity while others pertain only to its existence. That division rests on two unsound premises of theirs, premises rejected by the bulk of intelligent people among the nations, whether religious theologians or others.

One of those two premises is their earlier claim that the necessary attributes of a thing, as it exists outside the mind, are split into (a) essential attributes, forming a component of its quiddity and included within it, and (b) accidental attributes that lie outside that quiddity yet are inseparably bound to it.