Thus, the very attributes they have stripped from the Necessary Existent render it impossible and non-existent. For that reason they stand among the most self-contradictory of people: they described the Necessary Existent as an impossible existent. Accordingly, they recast it as “absolute existence” either on the condition of sheer absoluteness, or on the condition that every affirmative attribute be negated—as Ibn Sīnā and his followers have openly declared.

Yet in their own Greek logic they had already established—by what sound reason immediately perceives—that whatever is “absolute on condition of absoluteness” exists only in the mind, never in external reality: just as “man” in the absolutely abstract sense, “body” in the absolutely abstract sense, and “animal” in the absolutely abstract sense. With this they meant to differentiate between such abstractions and the existence that forms the subject of what they call First Philosophy and the supreme wisdom—the highest science in their view that investigates existence and its concomitants.

Existence, they say, is divided into necessary and contingent, eternal and originated, self-subsistent and dependent, and the genus subjected to division is shared by all the parts. Thus this existence embraces both the necessary and the contingent; it is the “absolute without condition,” the natural universal. Even so, they took one of the two divisions—the Necessary—and treated it as the “absolute on condition of absoluteness.” Likewise they made pure non-being the distinctive feature that separates necessary existence from contingent existence, which would turn sheer non-being into a differentia or a peculiar property.

This too is untenable, for when two things share in existence, the factor that distinguishes one from the other must itself be something real and positive; and even if one were to assume it to be privative, the Necessary—