When one of their more astute adherents met with me, he was convinced that this doctrine represents the ultimate level of verification, reached only by the most perfected of creation and understood solely by their inner circle. He went on to claim that “all-encompassing knowledge” (al-iḥāṭah) is identical with “absolute existence” (al-wujūd al-muṭlaq).

I said to him, “You ground your position in the principles of logic, yet it is well known in those very principles that the ‘absolute’ as such never exists externally; it can exist only as something particularized. Consequently, absolute existence cannot have any reality in the outside world.” He was dumbfounded, then began rummaging about in search of an answer. Eventually he said, “We shall exempt absolute existence from the class of universals.”

I replied, “You have been defeated,” and I laughed, for the falsity of his statement was manifest. If that logical rule were to differentiate between one sort of absoluteness and another, the rule itself would collapse. The distinction he proposed is sheer assertion and arbitrariness, whereas the rule in question is sound in itself—even if they refuse to acknowledge it—and it applies to every absolute. Indeed, we know with certainty that nothing universally absolute exists in the external realm at all.

As for the “absolute on condition of absoluteness”—such as “man” stripped of every predicate, who is neither one nor many, neither existent nor nonexistent, neither universal nor particular—this can never exist externally except as an actually existing man. Of necessity he must be either one individual or several, and he must be a determinate particular. When it is said that such a notion “exists in the mind,” all that is meant is that the mind conceives and posits it; otherwise, its very presence “in the mind” constitutes a limitation. Yet the mind