Thus, the Necessary Existent would be marked off by a mere privation, whereas the contingent would be marked off by a positive reality; and existence is superior to non-existence. Consequently—on Ibn Sīnā’s formulation—every contingent creature would be more perfect than the pre-eternal Necessary Existent, for the two share in existence, yet the Lord is distinguished only by the absence of positive attributes while the creature is distinguished by affirmative realities.

Astonishingly, they regard this discourse as the very summit of tawḥīd, verification, and wisdom, whereas in truth it is the height of negation, unbelief, ignorance, and misguidance. The reason is that what is “absolute on condition of absoluteness” has no external reality; it exists solely in the mind. They themselves admit this and set it forth in their own logic, saying that the universal (al-kullī) is of three kinds: the natural, the logical, and the intellectual. The natural universal is the pure quiddity, such as “humanity” or “animality.” The logical universal is the element of generality that accrues to that quiddity. The intellectual universal is a combination of the two—it is the natural universal on the condition that it be universal. Both the intellectual and the logical universals, they affirm, exist only in the mind.

As for the natural universal, they say that it does exist externally, but only as individuated and particularized; it forms part of the particular instance, and the quiddity that exists outside the mind, they maintain, is something over and above the externally realized existence itself. They also report that the followers of Plato affirmed the intellectual universal in external reality, abstracted from particulars, and they reviled them in the strongest terms. Yet whoever says that the Lord is “absolute existence on the condition of absoluteness” is in effect advancing the very same claim. They refute the Platonists who posited the Platonic Forms—universals abstracted from concrete things—insisting that such universals are fixed only in the mind and not in external reality; but according to their own principles, were these universals to be granted external existence