evidence for it that obliges them to agree with you, whether transmitted or rational. Yet you claim that this belongs to shared rational knowledge.” These matters are discussed at length elsewhere.

The purpose here is to draw attention to this underlying principle, which has given rise to disagreement or confusion concerning questions of the attributes in this respect.

The distinction these theologians draw, among attributes inseparable from their subject, between those they call nafsiyya and dhātiyya (attributes of the self and essence) and those they call ma‘nawiyya (attributes of meaning) resembles the logicians’ distinction among inseparable attributes between what they call essential and constitutive, internal to a thing’s reality, and what they call accidental, external to its essence despite being inseparable from it. They also distinguish between what is inseparable from a quiddity and what is inseparable from that quiddity’s existence.

This has been discussed at length elsewhere. It has been shown that these distinctions ultimately amount to the difference between what is conceived in the mind—which may be called a quiddity—and what exists in external reality—which may be called its existence.

A meaning conceived in the mind and expressed in words has a term that signifies it in its entirety: this is the term signifying that quiddity. It also has a component meaning, which is part of that quiddity, and the same term signifies this by inclusion. There is also a meaning necessarily entailed by it but external to it: this is what is inseparable from that quiddity yet lies outside it, and the term signifies it by implication.

That quiddity in the mind depends on the attributes of the subject that the mind conceives. These may be more numerous at one time and fewer at another, sometimes conceived summarily and sometimes in detail. As for the attributes inseparable from the subject in external reality, they are all inseparable from it: its essence cannot subsist if any one of them is absent. None of them precedes the subject in actual existence, as they have