If he says:
“I mean that the human being, considered as such, is composed of these things,”
he should be told:
“The human being considered as such has no external existence. This is merely the human being in the abstract, and abstractions exist as such only in the mind. You have thus made the composite something conceived by the mind, and what the mind conceives is composed of whatever elements it posits.
“If you conceive a body endowed with sensation, capable of voluntary movement, and rational, this mental conception is composed of these elements. If you conceive a rational animal, it is composed of these two elements; and if you conceive a neighing animal, it is composed of those two elements.
“If you say, ‘The realities that exist externally are composed of these mental images,’ this is necessarily known to be false. But if you say, ‘These images correspond to those realities and are true of them,’ this is correct, provided that what is in the mind is knowledge rather than ignorance.”
This matter has been discussed at length elsewhere.
The point here is that if someone allows diverse realities to be treated as one and the same reality, his argument entails treating the existence of those diverse realities as one and the same existence. Indeed, this follows even more readily, since existing things share the designation “existence.” Someone who is confused into thinking that knowledge is power, and that both are the very essence that knows and has power, is all the more likely to be confused into thinking that existence is one.
This argument, set out in terms of composition, is the foundation of the position of the Jahmiyyah who deny the attributes and acts. These are the Jahmiyyah among the philosophers and others like them, and they call this tawhīd (monotheism).
[The Argument from Accidents among the Theologians]
As for the Muʿtazilah and their followers, they may use this argument, but their principal reliance is on the argument by which they claim to have established the temporal origination of the world: the argument from accidents. For they argued for the temporal origination of