sight can, in principle, be directed toward every existent (1); accordingly, every existent may be perceived, and whatever cannot be perceived is non-existent. Some extended this rule to the sense of touch, while others generalized it to all the senses, as did a faction of the Ashʿarī theologians who affirm the divine attributes (2) and others besides them.

The point here is that those debating mushrikīn (polytheists) spoke in vague, sweeping terms: they treated what is particular as if it were universal and what is specific as if it were absolute, saying, “You have not sensed it, and whatever you have not sensed does not exist.” Their second premise is false, yet they disguised it with a grain of truth—namely, that what cannot possibly be sensed in any way does not exist (3). The debaters from the Ṣābiʾiyyah (4) confronted them on this point, and Jahm and his followers adopted that very premise from the Sabians. In doing so, they denied the truth that those first polemicists had only obscured with falsehood. They went on to claim that something may exist while remaining utterly insensible at every time to every faculty, and they alleged that the soul is of that sort. Having embraced this invalid premise against those polytheists, they then turned it against their own believing brethren, arguing with the believers in the same manner they had argued with the polytheists—like a man who fights the believers just as he fights the polytheists, on the pretext that if he does not wage such a battle the polytheists will overpower him (5). Likewise, these people maintain that unless they conduct this particular debate with the polytheists, the polytheists will gain the upper hand, the believers will be left without an argument, and they themselves will be unable to reason or debate, for—so they claim—there is no path open to them except this innovated path.