This is the defining characteristic of necessary knowledge: it takes hold of a person’s mind so inescapably that he cannot dismiss it. If a person cannot dismiss these propositions from his mind or overcome his own mind in rejecting them, it becomes clear that they are necessary truths. Those who reject them seek to alter the innate disposition with which Allah created humankind and to alter His creation, like their counterparts among those who deny and reject the truth, repudiating known truth through falsehood and sophistry. Their attack on these propositions is like the attacks made by their counterparts among the Sophists on similar propositions.

As for his statement:

“So powerful is the hold of the estimative faculty.”

We have said more than once that they have defined the estimative faculty as the faculty that conceives particular meanings in particular objects of sense. This faculty operates only upon particular meanings. These propositions, however, are universal propositions and thus belong to the judgments of sound reason. Whoever opposes them therefore opposes sound reason; it is he who follows the judgments of a corrupted estimative faculty. For he affirms an absolute existent subject to the condition of absoluteness, or an existent that is neither within the world nor outside it.

Only corrupted estimation and imagination affirm that such an existent exists in external reality. Neither sound reason nor authentic transmitted evidence affirms it, nor even accurate estimation or sound imagination, just as sound sense perception does not affirm it. Thus, those who deny this reject what is required by reason, revealed law, sound sense perception, sound estimation, and sound imagination, while affirming what can be apprehended only through corrupted estimation and corrupted imagination.