and the foot and neck: they say, “This is long, and that is short.” Of the neck and hand, they also say, “This is broad, and that is slender and thin.”

As for “deep,” they use it of wells and the like. They do not describe a person’s mouth as deep, nor his ear, eye, or similar organs—let alone a lentil, a sesame seed, or a speck.

Thus, when they describe something as long, broad, and deep, they do not intend the familiar linguistic meanings, or what people understand by length, breadth, and depth. Rather, they intend this general meaning to which they have assigned the terms “length,” “breadth,” and “depth.” Yet they then say that everything described by these general meanings must be alike and identical in definition and reality, differing only in its accidental attributes.

This claim is among those furthest removed from what people understand through their senses and reason.

Even supposing this were so, no two rational people would dispute that this is not what the word “like” means in Arabic or in the languages of other nations. When someone is told, “Such-and-such is like such-and-such,” or “It is not like it,” or “This has nothing like it,” the meaning understood from “like” is not that each of the two things can be pointed to, or that each has a magnitude, or length, breadth, and depth—neither in the linguistic sense nor in a sense closer to it, let alone in their technical usage.

We know as a matter of necessity from Arabic usage that people do not say, “A mountain is like fire,” or “Air is like water,” or “Camels are like cattle,” or “The sun and moon are like gold and silver,” even though the things compared share many attributes beyond