This knowledge is the active knowledge required for action. In their view, the Lord’s knowledge is active; how, then, can His very knowledge of something be identical with the object known that He brought into existence externally? Would anyone who understands what he is saying say such a thing?

[The Fourth Aspect]

His statement:

“Consider your own case: you apprehend something through a form that you conceive or call to mind. This form proceeds from you—not entirely from you alone, but with some contribution from something other than yourself. Nevertheless, you do not apprehend that form through another form. Rather, just as you apprehend that thing through it, you also apprehend the form itself through itself, without forms multiplying within you.”

Up to his statement:

“If this is your relation to what proceeds from you with the contribution of something else, what, then, do you suppose is the relation of an intelligent being to what proceeds from it by virtue of its own essence, without anything else intervening?”

The reply to him is:

This is obfuscation that can deceive only someone who is ignorant or feigns ignorance. There are two things here:

The first is the thing that exists externally. It is of this that they say: apprehending it consists in its form being imprinted in the knower.

The second is the cognitive form itself within the one apprehending, which corresponds to this object of knowledge. No one has said that this form requires another form, for this form is knowledge itself. They have said that knowledge is a form corresponding to the object known. Knowledge, insofar as it is knowledge, need not have within the intellect a form other than itself that corresponds to it,