is the approach of Abū ʿAlī, Abū Hāshim, and those who agree with them.

The response is:

These people merely drew an analogy with writing requiring a writer, a building requiring a builder, and similar examples. Yet it is well known that neither the builder nor the writer brings a body into existence; he merely produces a particular arrangement in existing bodies, which is an accident.

How, then, can someone like this be regarded as bringing entities themselves into existence, while the One who created the human being from a drop of sperm and the tree from a seed is regarded as having produced only attributes? The Muʿtazilah, however, do not say that a body brings another body into existence, but only that it produces an accident.

The second sense of matter and form concerns natural forms: the forms of animals, plants, minerals, and the like. If “form” here means merely their shape, then it is an accident inhering in a body; but this is not what the philosophers mean. If “form” means the shaped body itself, then it is undoubtedly a perceptible substance subsisting in itself. Any speculative theologian who says, “This is an accident inhering in a substance,” is mistaken.

At this point, the proponent of philosophy says, “This form inheres in matter and hayūlā.” If by this he means that from which the human being was created, such as semen—though that is not what he means—then undoubtedly that was another body which has perished and undergone transformation, and is not now