a condition for that form’s being present, what depends on a condition cannot exist without it. Thus, the form cannot be present to him except by inhering in him, since inherence is a condition of its presence. His subsequent claim that it can be present to him without inhering in him therefore combines two contradictories.

He should instead have said:

“Your being a substrate for the form was merely a cause of its being present to you. It may become present through this cause sometimes, and through another at other times.”

Even had he said this, however, it too would have been false. But he knows that this inherence is a condition for the servant’s intellectual apprehension; he merely claims that it is not a condition for the Lord’s knowledge.

[The Eighth Argument]

The response is:

Knowledge cannot be present to a knower without subsisting in him. Thus, if the intellectual form is knowledge itself, or if knowledge necessarily entails that form and cannot exist without it because it is a condition of knowledge, then neither knowledge nor the intellectual form—which is knowledge itself, a condition of it, or its necessary concomitant—can be present to the knower without inhering in him. The same impossibility applies to all other attributes of a living being: knowledge, power, love, hatred, approval, displeasure, joy, pain, pleasure, or any other attribute of a living being cannot be possessed without inhering in that living being. Such an attribute can belong to him only by inhering in him, not by existing separately from him.

[The Ninth Argument]

The response is:

If, by the form that is present without inhering, he means merely the existent form—though this is not what he intended—then