and have treated imaginary mental forms as realities existing outside the mind. This ultimately led them to assign to the Necessary Existent—the Creator of the heavens and the earth, the Lord of all worlds—an unqualified existence in their minds and an accident subsisting in their souls, with no reality, existence, or actual being outside the mind. They say:

“His existence is intelligible, not perceptible to the senses.”

Yet it is intelligible only within their minds, just as they conceive universals subsisting in the intellect. Unqualified existence is like animality without qualification, or humanity, body, sun, moon, and celestial sphere taken without qualification, and other such things that exist only in minds, not as concrete entities.

This is the ultimate conception of monotheism that they claim the messengers brought. Undoubtedly, even the least of the messengers’ followers has too sound and complete an intellect to regard this as existing in external reality, let alone to make it the Lord of all worlds, the Master of the Day of Judgment. Glorified and exalted is He, far above what the wrongdoers say.

As for his statement, “What is common must be either a necessary concomitant, that which necessarily entails it, an accidental attribute, or the subject of an accidental attribute,” it may be replied:

What you have called common and shared is that of which you have made what is different and distinguishing a necessary concomitant