—and, in this sense, the Essence alone is necessary, not the attributes; moreover, what they mean by the Necessary Existent is something that has no relationship whatsoever to anything outside itself, yet such a notion has no reality. For the Lord—exalted is He—does have a connection with His creatures, all the more so according to those materialist philosophers who claim that by His very Essence He necessarily produces the celestial spheres and is inseparable from them, thereby making Him concomitant with His effects. How, then, can they deny that His Essence is concomitant with His attributes?

These Greek philosophers—called the Peripatetics, the followers of Aristotle, the author of the treatises on logic, natural philosophy, mathematics, and metaphysics—say that the subject matter of natural science concerns what is bound up with matter, both in the mind and in external reality, namely the body and its properties.

The second branch, mathematics, is tied to matter in external reality but not in the intellect; for outside the mind no number or magnitude exists except within a physical body, an accidental attribute that is counted, or a separate measured entity. The mind, by contrast, can abstract pure numbers and magnitudes from the concrete objects that are counted or measured.

The third branch, which they call “metaphysics” in terms of the order of theoretical pursuit—though in actual existence it precedes the other two—and which they also name “the divine science,” has for its subject that which is abstracted from matter both in thought and in the external world: being qua being, its division into substance and accident, the further division of substance into corporeal and incorporeal, and the division of body into matter, form, intellects, and souls.