an action, and an action with his foot, and listening to this reciter, that reciter, and a third. The servant may be unable to combine these things, not because their coexistence is intrinsically impossible: hearing one does not inherently conflict with hearing another, nor does one movement inherently conflict with another. Their coexistence is therefore conceivable, unlike the coexistence of opposites.

Likewise, seeing different objects does not involve mutual incompatibility. Moving the eyelids in two different directions, however, does: the movements themselves are mutually incompatible, whereas the perception resulting from them is not intrinsically so.

If, then, we suppose a perception that does not require movement, or that results from a single movement—as when someone looks at the sky with a single fixed gaze—his perceptions of these objects at the same instant would not be mutually incompatible. Can the same be said of sound: that sounds can arise without movements, and that, in that case, sounds coexisting in a single locus at the same time would not be mutually incompatible?

This is disputed, and the majority of rational thinkers hold it to be impossible. If coexistence is possible here, this case is like that of the meanings of speech and the attributes; if coexistence is impossible, it is like that of opposites.

On this assumption, the view of someone who holds that these things can coexist is no more implausible than the view of someone who says that those distinct realities constitute a single thing.