Third reply: We may say that the exhaustive classification of opposites is as follows. Two opposites are either differentiated by affirmation and negation, or they are not but are instead both affirmative or both negative. The first type are contradictories. As for the second, either the subject can be free of both predicates or it cannot. When it can, the pair are contraries, like blackness and whiteness. When it cannot, the two function as contradictories even though both are affirmative, such as necessity and possibility, origination and pre-eternity, self-subsistence and dependence on another, separation and adjacency, and the like.
It is obvious that life and death, or deafness and muteness on the one hand and hearing on the other, do not belong to the sort where, if the subject is stripped of both, it can be described by a third attribute that lies between them—as redness lies between blackness and whiteness. The subject therefore cannot be devoid of both; once one is negated, the other is necessarily affirmed.
Fourth reply: A locus that cannot receive life, knowledge, power, speech, and similar attributes is more deficient than a locus that can receive them yet happens to lack them. For this reason a stone and the like are more deficient than a living creature that happens to be blind.
Accordingly, if the Creator is declared transcendent above being stripped of these attributes while being capable of them, then declaring Him transcendent above the very impossibility of receiving them is even more fitting. For if He were capable of receiving them, the simultaneous absence of both opposites would be impossible, and attributing deficiencies to Him is impossible; therefore He must necessarily possess the attributes of perfection. But if He were not capable of receiving them at all, He could not be characterized either by attributes of perfection or by attributes of deficiency—and that is even more inconceivable. It is thus established that His possessing these attributes is possible, indeed necessary for Him. This is the desired conclusion, and it is of the utmost elegance.