the attributes, for on their position the falsity of the eternalists’ view is plain.

If he means that intellectually apprehending what exists externally is not conditional upon the presence of an intelligible form, he himself has acknowledged the existence of an intelligible form and claimed that it is the form of the effect.

We further say: our argument requires only the affirmation of knowledge subsisting in the knower, whether or not it is called an intelligible form. Intellectual apprehension of external existence is possible only if an apprehension of it subsists in the one who apprehends. That intellection is not the intellection existing externally and separate from the one who apprehends.

If that intellection is called an intelligible form, and it is said that intellectual apprehension is not conditional upon it, this would mean that the existence of knowledge is not conditional upon the existence of knowledge.

It is well known that a thing cannot exist without what necessarily accompanies it. How, then, can a thing exist when it does not exist? Is this anything other than combining two contradictories: its existence and its nonexistence?

Thus, the knower’s being the locus of knowledge is a condition for knowledge to occur. For it is impossible for the knower to possess knowledge without being characterized by it and without its subsisting in him. Intellectual apprehension, which is knowledge, can therefore belong to the one who apprehends only if he—the knower—is the locus of that apprehension, which is knowledge. Likewise, a lover cannot be a lover unless love subsists in him. The same applies to will, speech, and all other attributes.

This is a consistently applied principle of Ahl al-Sunnah: when an attribute subsists in a subject, that subject is characterized accordingly, and no other subject is characterized by that attribute.