And an attribute of a thing cannot create the thing it qualifies, nor can a part of a thing create the whole. Thus, even if absolute existence conditioned by absoluteness were assumed to exist in external reality, it could not bring other existents into being; indeed, it could not even be a condition for their existence. Newly originated and contingent beings, whose origination and need for the Creator who brings them into being are known, would therefore have no need of this absolute existence conditioned by absoluteness—if it is claimed that it exists in external reality. How much more so when the person advancing this view is among the fiercest critics of those who hold that these absolute universals, abstracted from concrete entities, exist outside the mind!

They have established that the highest science, or first philosophy, is the science concerned with existence and its concomitants. They therefore made absolute existence the subject of this science. Yet this is the absolute existence that is divided into necessary and contingent, cause and effect, eternal and originated.

The subject of a division is common to all its divisions.

They could therefore not identify this existence, which is divided into necessary and contingent, with necessary existence. Instead, they made necessary existence absolute existence conditioned by absoluteness, having no reality other than absolute existence, or conditioned by the negation of affirmative realities. They express this by saying that its existence does not inhere as an accident in any quiddity or reality.

This formulation rests on their erroneous principle that existence inheres as an accident in realities subsisting in the external world. This, in turn, rests on the assumption that a thing’s existence in the external world is distinct from its reality. There would thus be a reality in the external world to which existence attaches at one time and from which it departs at another.