He said:
“This is a sufficient answer to refute him by the method of dialectical disputation.”

I say:
By “the method of dialectical disputation,” he means counterargument and refutation, which invalidate the proponent’s argument and demonstrate its unsoundness, even if one does not know how to resolve it. For what he has said concerning knowledge applies with even greater force to action. Unaided reason plainly recognizes that a thing’s being produced is inferior to its being known: things produced are inferior to their agent, whereas not everything known is inferior to its knower. A person knows things more perfect than himself, but does not produce anything more perfect than himself.

What is produced must therefore be inferior to its agent, and the agent must be more perfect than what it produces. The same is not necessarily true of the knower and the known. Rather, a knower may know something more perfect than himself, or something that does not depend upon him in any respect. What he produces, however, depends upon him.

Thus, if things’ being produced by it does not entail any deficiency in it or any perfection it acquires through them, then, with even greater reason, their being known by it entails neither deficiency in it nor perfection acquired through them. For their being produced is a lower status for them than their being known by it. If its agency is complete only through them, yet this is not a deficiency, then, with even greater reason, its being a knower—which likewise is complete only through them—does not constitute a deficiency.

This is so for several reasons:

First: Their being produced is a lower status for them than their being known.

Second: Action’s being inseparable from it has a stronger claim to be regarded as a deficiency than knowledge’s being inseparable from it.

Third: Agency more necessarily entails something produced than being a knower entails the existence of