Know, then, that what we have just said may itself be taken as an independent method for establishing the attributes of perfection for Him: such attributes are either necessary for Him or impossible for Him. The second option is false, so the first is binding; for if He were merely receptive to the attribute yet devoid of it, this would render the attribute possible for Him, and that is inconceivable with respect to the Necessary Existent. This line of reasoning is well known among those theologians who adopt it.

Second reply: On their principles, when we say, “Zayd is either rational or not rational, either knowledgeable or not knowledgeable, either living or not living, either articulate or not articulate,” and the like—where a given subject is stripped of a quality it is capable of possessing—they would have to deny that such statements fall under the heading of affirmation-and-negation opposition. Plainly, this contradicts what is known by necessity, what all rational people agree upon, and what is stated in logic and elsewhere.

It is self-evident that these propositions stand in contradictory opposition: the truth of one entails the falsehood of the other, so they cannot both be true nor both be false. All the conditions of contradiction are present.

The most they attempt to distinguish is to say: if we say, “He is either seeing or not seeing,” we have affirmation and negation, whereas if we say, “He is either seeing or blind,” we have possession and privation. Yet this is merely a verbal dispute, for the meaning in both cases is identical. It therefore follows that such pairs are one type of affirmation-and-negation opposition, and this invalidates their definition of that opposition—namely, that neither of the two terms can be transformed into the other—for such transformation is just as possible here as when one uses the word “blindness.”