They call this mode of existence “iḥāṭah” (all-encompassing being). In their words, it is Absolute Existence—either on the explicit condition that it be completely unrestricted, and that, they say, is the “intelligible universal.” According to the majority of thinkers, such a universal exists only in the mind, not in external reality. Yet it is reported that the school of Plato affirmed the extra-mental existence of these universals, abstracted from particulars. They maintained that from pre-eternity there subsists an Absolute Humanity, an Absolute Animality, and the like, and they named them the Platonic Forms or the “suspended forms.”

Their fellow philosopher Aristotle, together with his followers and the great majority of rational people, refuted this view, showing that these universals are mere mental conceptions with no concrete existence—just as the mind may picture a pure number or pure magnitudes such as a point, a line, a surface, or the ideal geometric body. None of these exists among the actual entities found outside the mind.

Those who champion “the absolute conditioned by absoluteness” imagine that it does have an external reality; they sometimes term it iḥāṭah, meaning existence stripped of every qualification. After that they posit “the absolute without condition,” the generic reality that subdivides into what is necessary and what is contingent.