and no moment conceived as existing is itself beginningless eternity. At every moment, some of them exist and others do not; thus, the existence of some is always concurrent with the beginninglessness of others. Accordingly, their being together in beginningless eternity means that they share the absence of a beginning, while their not being together in it means that, at every moment, one of them has always existed and its nonexistence has ceased. There is no contradiction between their sharing the absence of a beginning and the continuous existence of their individual instances, unless it is said:

“A perpetual genus of occurrences is impossible.”

The proponent of this argument objected to what al-Āmidī and al-Armawī had stated in the first argument. He said:

“If you say, ‘What is beginningless is motion as a universal, meaning that each instance is preceded by another, with no first instance—not its existing individual instances, which necessarily have something preceding them.’”

He then said:

“I reply: In that case, what is judged to be beginningless does not exist in external reality, since motion as a universal cannot exist in external reality; and whatever instances of it exist in external reality are not beginningless.”

One may reply: This is an error arising from the ambiguity of the term “universal.” A universal, taken absolutely, cannot exist in external reality only when it is abstracted from its individual instances—for example, an unspecified human being, an unspecified animal, motion unrelated to any moving thing or direction, or an unspecified color that is neither white nor black nor any other particular color.

Thus, if one supposes an unspecified motion unrelated to any particular moving thing, its existence in external reality is impossible. As for successive motions, the existence of the universal in them is the existence of those individual instances, just as, when several human beings exist, the existence of