given to it. If it is understood as the collective configuration, that configuration depends upon the contingent individuals; what depends upon something contingent has even greater reason to be contingent. Moreover, the collective configuration is a relation dependent upon something else, and is therefore even more characterized by contingency and dependence than other things. It is among the weakest accidents dependent upon concrete entities—if it is supposed to have actual existence; otherwise, it has no existence. If the aggregate is understood as each individual member, or as both—each individual member together with their combination—or in any other way, whatever interpretation is given to it, it can only be contingent and dependent upon something else. The more instances of contingency there are, the greater the dependence and need.

If it is said, “The cause of this is one of its members, which is contingent,” it follows that a contingent being which has not yet come into existence is the agent that brings all contingent beings into existence. Yet it is itself one of those contingent beings, and must therefore also have an agent that brings it into existence.

This objector took the aggregate composed of the necessary being and contingent beings and used it to challenge the argument concerning the aggregate of contingent beings. The term “aggregate” is ambiguous: it may mean their combination, all the individuals, or both. His objection was therefore entirely unsound 0. For that aggregate includes a being that exists necessarily through itself and has no need of anything else, while all the other individuals and their collective configuration are brought into existence by it. This is intelligible.