he replied:

“For several reasons, including this: we know necessarily, through the self-evident principles of reason and its premises, that bodies, when they exist, cannot be devoid of conjunction or separation. For, when they exist, they must either be touching and closely adjoining, each beside the other, or distinct and apart, none beside the other. There is no intermediate state between these two. If they are touching, that is what conjunction means; if they are apart, that is what separation means.”

He said:

“Another consideration that makes this clear is that, if we were to allow that a body could exist devoid of motion and rest, conjunction and separation, life and death, blackness, whiteness and other colors, and all other states, no way could be found for this, and it would be impossible. For we have found that these accidents succeed one another in bodies. What succession means is that one of them occurs after another.”

[Ibn Taymiyyah’s commentary]

I say:

As for conjunction and separation, if we suppose that two bodies exist, they must either be joined or be separate. But a single body with no other body alongside it cannot be described as joined to another or separated from it. Only someone who holds that it is composed of individual parts describes it in terms of conjunction and separation. He then says: those parts are either joined or separate. Yet this is known neither self-evidently nor through sense perception, and most people do not concede it.