, earth, human beings, horses, gold, wheat, and dates, then each of these bodies has intrinsic attributes inseparable from it, which cease only when its very nature is transformed.

The claim that a body has no intrinsic attributes other than occupying space, being capable of bearing accidents, and subsisting in itself is therefore even more unsound than the position of the logicians. The latter, for example, counted an animal’s capacity for sensation and voluntary movement among its essential attributes, whereas these people recognize no intrinsic attribute in it other than its being a body.

Occupying space, being capable of bearing accidents, and subsisting in itself are properties shared by all bodies. Different things share many necessary properties, just as different colours share the properties of being colours and being accidents. The essence of fire is not merely that it occupies space, can bear accidents, and subsists in itself; rather, these are among its necessary properties.

Moreover, those who maintain that things cannot resemble one another in one respect while differing in another, such as Abū al-Ma‘ālī and others, may concede that different accidents share certain features. They have explicitly stated that the eternal and the originated are alike in being real, and that the eternal shares certain features with what is brought into existence.

Sharing some affirmative attributes does not constitute likeness. This explicitly acknowledges that two different things are equal in certain attributes and share them. How, then, can it be said that two different things do not resemble one another in some respects, when their equality in certain matters has been explicitly acknowledged? At most, one could say that they do not differ in any respect in their intrinsic attributes, even if they resemble one another in attributes arising from inhering qualities.

Yet the wording does not indicate this, and so the matter returns to what was discussed above.

And Allah has stated