other than the ones who carried them to the rest. The transmitters through whom this group received—by continuous mass transmission—the Prophet’s signs and rulings were not the same transmitters who conveyed them to that other group. Thus the Companions who informed the people of al-Shām of the Messenger’s signs, the Qur’an, and the laws of Islam were different from the Companions who informed the people of Iraq; yet the report of the former corroborated the report of the latter, even though neither party knew the particular individuals who had carried the news to the other.

The same pattern is found in every other branch of learning. The teacher who initiated this set of students into fiqh (jurisprudence), dialectical reasoning, grammar, or medicine may be quite different from the one who taught that set, even though all of them share the same disciplines of fiqh, reasoning, grammar, and medicine and possess the same kinds of particulars and general principles. Their respective routes to that knowledge are not identical, even while they converge in the very subject-matter.

Most of what people ascertain through the senses belongs to this category. A person is directly aware of his own conditions—hunger, thirst, satiety, quenching, love, hate, desire, aversion, pain, and pleasure; indeed, he senses his own organs, such as his stomach or his private parts—while he does not sense the inner states of anyone else. Nevertheless, they all share in the general class of such sensations: everyone experiences hunger and satiety, and they may even share in perceptions beyond what each can feel in the other, such as their common sight of the sun, the moon, the crescent, and the stars.

A faction of speculative theologians schooled in Greek logic went astray on precisely this issue. They claimed that the empirical sciences, the sciences established by mass transmission, and the intuitive sciences—when intuition is treated as a separate subdivision—