[Fourth Argument]

He claimed that this agent is nobler than the agent that produced a building or something similar.

The response is: If you claim that an agent producing motion in something else is nobler than one producing that thing’s composition, this is not conceded—especially when the former acts by virtue of being loved or followed, whereas the latter originates the very composition inhering in something else.

It is well known that a composite thing depends on its composition more than a moving thing depends on its motion. Moreover, the change in the very being of a composite thing when its composition breaks apart is more evident than the disruption of a moving thing when its motion ceases. If you regard the producer of motion as an agent, then the producer of composition has an even stronger claim to be regarded as an agent. This is something observable: someone who gathers scattered parts and makes them into a single thing is not like someone who moves a stationary thing—especially if the latter moves it as bread moves a hungry person, water a thirsty person, a woman a man, or a man a woman. How much more so if it is like an imam moving someone who follows him in prayer?

If he says, “That agent produces motion continually, whereas the agent producing composition does so only when bringing it into being”—and this is the point he intended—then the response is: Nothing in observable experience continually produces motion without which the moving thing cannot subsist.

Thus your statement, “The philosophers’ position is more readily understood in observable experience than