reply. For if no part of the totality is beginningless, this denies beginninglessness to the individual instances of the kind; and denying beginninglessness means affirming that something came into existence. The statement thus amounts to this: if each individual instance or successive part came into existence, then the kind whose instances succeed one another must also have come into existence. The invalidity of this statement has already been established.

Abū al-Hasan al-Āmidī and others included this premise—namely, ruling out successive causes—in their proof of the Necessary Existent, although they have no need of it. It rests on two premises. The first is that a cause may precede its effect. Yet in his book entitled Daqā’iq al-haqā’iq, he stated the opposite of what he stated here in his book entitled Abkār al-afkār. In proving the Necessary Existent, he presented the argument previously quoted from him, saying:

“If causes and effects are infinite, they must either succeed one another or exist together. The first alternative cannot be accepted, for we have already demonstrated that a cause and its effect cannot be separated.”

What he stated earlier was that neither a cause or agent’s being the cause of its effect, nor the effect’s being an effect, requires prior nonexistence. For any of