In reply one may say: That proposition entails that the primary causes themselves undergo changing states, and the alteration of those states is something newly originated that itself demands an explanation; for a fixed cause cannot issue forth non-fixed effects. This is the first line of critique.

The second line is this: Grant, if you wish, that motion is produced by newly arisen states within that essence. Yet cause and effect must coexist; therefore, if the effect were permanent, its cause would have to be permanent as well. Motion, however, passes away, and the states that engender it—individual perceptions and particular volitions—likewise pass away, leaving nothing that endures. Consequently, just as their effect is originated rather than eternal, so it must vanish when they vanish and cannot remain.

If you then claim that some other newly arisen factor, different from the first, functions as the cause, we answer: the “new occurrence” in question is simply the successive motion itself. Because it is not stable, neither its cause nor its effect can be stable. Just as what is stable cannot yield what is unstable, what is unstable cannot yield something stable; the effect invariably matches the cause in respect of permanence or impermanence.

Thus, these people have asserted occurrences that never truly occur, and they have upheld the persistence of entities without any agent to uphold them. The substance of their view is that contingents have no originator and enduring things have no preserver—an outright denial of the Creator who brings possibles and events into being. Such is the inescapable consequence of their doctrine.