“Place cannot stand in a relation of presence or absence to what is not in a place.”

It does not follow that this proposition is the false one. Rather, the false one may be his statement: “The soul is nothing but a body.”

A similar contradiction occurs in his statement: “The Necessary Existent intellectually apprehends, through its own essence, that of which it is the principle. It is the principle of complete beings individually, and therefore apprehends complete beings individually, things subject to generation and corruption in terms of their species, and, through these, their individual instances.” For if the Necessary Existent intellectually apprehends the celestial spheres individually, and these are bodies, while he has stated that a body can be imprinted only in a body, it follows that the Necessary Existent must be a body.

This must also be considered alongside his statement: “Something spatial cannot stand in a relation of presence or absence to what is not in a place,” and his statement: “A body that is present and existent can be present and existent only to a body; it cannot be present to what is not a body.”

Taken together, these statements entail that, according to him, the Necessary Existent is a body, and that, according to his statements, the soul too is a body.

What Abū al-Barakāt has presented merely exposes a contradiction in Ibn Sīnā’s position; it contains nothing that demonstrates the falsity of Ibn Sīnā’s account of perception. Rather, Abū al-Barakāt argued against that account on the grounds that objects of perception are large, whereas the perceiver, if it is a body or a faculty within a body, is small and cannot contain them.