proposition and take the contingent to mean whatever has a cause, as Abū Hāmid mentioned. Even if this proposition is conceded, the division will not lead him to his intended conclusion, because initially dividing what exists into that which has a cause and that which has none is not self-evident.

Moreover, what has a cause is divided into the contingent and the necessary. If we understand the contingent here as the genuinely contingent, this leads to something contingent yet necessary, not to something necessary that has no cause. If, however, we understand the contingent as something that has a cause and is necessary, all that follows is that whatever has a cause has a cause. We could then suppose that this cause itself has a cause, and that this continues without end. Thus the argument does not arrive at an existent without a cause—which is what they mean by the Necessary Existent—unless the contingent, which he set in opposition to that which has no cause, is understood as the genuinely contingent. For it is in the case of these contingent things that an infinite series of causes is impossible.

If, however, by the contingent he means those necessary things that have a cause, it has not yet been shown that such an infinite series is impossible in the way demonstrated concerning genuinely contingent existents. Nor has it yet been shown that there is here something necessary that requires a cause, so that this supposition would entail that the series must terminate in