be pointed to or perceived by the senses in any way, and which are neither within anything in the world nor outside it, neither distinct from it nor inhering in it. For it is well known that intelligibles are what a person apprehends intellectually: they are objects of the intellect.

The clearest examples are abstract universals, such as humanity, animality, body, and existence considered without qualification, and the like. These exist in the intellect. Nothing exists externally in an unqualified, indeterminate state; whatever exists is determinate and particular, and is perceptible by the senses. Only misguided philosophers affirm the external existence of abstract intelligibles: the Pythagoreans, who affirm abstract number, and the Platonists, who affirm the Platonic Forms—which are abstract essences—as well as abstract prime matter, abstract duration, and the abstract void.

As for Aristotle and his followers, such as al-Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā, they rejected their predecessors’ affirmation of these as abstractions separate from concrete entities, but affirmed them as conjoined with concrete entities. Thus they posited intelligible substances, such as matter and form, alongside sensible bodies. When their position is closely examined, however, nothing is found to exist externally except bodies and their accidents. They also affirmed the external existence of universals conjoined with concrete entities. Yet when their position is closely examined, nothing is found to exist externally except concrete entities with the attributes inhering in them.

Likewise, when their affirmation of the ten separate intellects is closely examined, these are found to exist only in the intellect, not externally, as has been discussed at length in refuting them elsewhere.

Thus the argument mentioned by Imam Ahmad, in which Jahm argued against the naturalist Sumaniyya by affirming an intelligible being, is like the Peripatetics’ argument against the naturalists; and what is contained in