A second reply is this: for existence or for necessity to be the effect of a receptive cause is not impossible; what is impossible is that it be the effect of an efficient cause. The receptive cause is like a subject that can receive its attribute, whereas the efficient cause is like a craftsman who brings his product into being. Proof only shows that the Necessary Being in Himself—together with His necessity and His existence—can neither be produced nor be the effect of an efficient agent; it does not show that necessity can only be an attribute of the Necessary, nor that existence cannot be an attribute of the existent, according to those who hold that a thing’s existence is something added to its essence.

Thus the Muʿtazilites, and those who side with them in saying that a thing’s concrete existence is additional to its quiddity—though their view is not without error—are nonetheless less mistaken and closer to the truth than those philosophers who treated existence as either absolute or conditioned by non-existence. The philosophers thereby asserted what plain reason knows to be impossible on many counts, and their view entails disabling and denying the Lord of the worlds, rejecting His sent prophets, and departing from the path of the believers.

As for the second kind of composition—composition of the particular and the universal—we (and you), together with the majority of people, hold that existence is divided into necessary and contingent, and that what is divided is something common to both sections. This division pertains to meanings, not to mere homonymous words, whether the meanings are unequal (in which case their expressions are what logicians call equivocal terms) or equal, namely the specifically univocal names; generic univocity in fact subsumes the equivocal. Since existence is thus divided into these two kinds, the Necessary must therefore be distinguished from the rest by