He said:

“Abū Hāmid sought, in his book known as al-Maqāsid, to challenge this premise—namely, that everything seen lies in a direction relative to the viewer—by arguing that a person sees himself in a mirror, although his self is not in any direction relative to him, nor in any other direction facing him. Since he sees himself, yet his self is not transferred into the mirror facing him, he therefore sees himself in no direction.”

He said:

“This is a fallacy, for what he sees is merely an image of himself. The image lies in a direction, since it is in the mirror, and the mirror lies in a direction.

As for their argument that something which is not a body can be seen, two arguments are well known among them.

The first—and the better known of the two—is their claim that a thing must be seen either because it is coloured, because it is a body, because it is a colour, or because it exists. Sometimes they enumerate grounds other than these. Then they say:

‘It is false that a thing is seen because it is a body, for if that were so, we would not see anything that