Thus the unsoundness of their doctrine stands exposed on both contradictory assumptions alike, and is therefore certainly false in itself. For if no contingent event can proceed from the Eternal, the Necessary-in-Himself, save through the occurrence of a cause or a state related to the thing produced, while they also maintain that nothing contingent or voluntary inheres in the Necessary-in-Himself and that no new state ever befalls Him—His condition before producing a given particular and after it being exactly the same—then He would not be the producer of any event whatsoever, whether by means of an intermediary or without one; and that would entail the occurrence of events without a producer.

At this juncture they offer an excuse, claiming that the Necessary-in-Himself, whom they call the First Cause and the First Principle, is always diffusing a universal emanation, yet the advent of contingent events from Him depends on the arising of dispositions and receptive capacities; once these appear, the emanation issues from Him. They say the same about the Active Intellect, alleging that its effusion upon the sublunary realm is universal, but that this too depends on the emergence of dispositions and receptivities produced by the mingling of bodies resulting from the motions of the celestial spheres and the conjunctions of the planets.

This excuse is among the gravest errors and most baseless claims for two reasons:

First, in their own system the Active Intellect is neither a complete cause of what it effuses nor an independent agent; rather, its effusion depends on events that arise from something other than itself, as though it had a partner in the act of emanation. Consequently, its effusion is conditional.