any ulterior aim. Rather, He wills it for His own sake, by means of this distinctive intellectual kind of willing. His life is exactly the same, for the life familiar to us is perfected through perception and action—acts of apprehension and motion that issue from two separate faculties. It has already been stated that the very thing He perceives—namely, His knowledge of the whole—is the cause of the whole, and that this same thing is the principle of His act, which is the originating of the whole. Thus, the meaning of life in His case, and what He attains by it, is cognition and a means to bringing things into existence; life, for Him, does not depend on two different powers, nor is His life anything other than knowledge.

He says further:

“Likewise, the power He possesses is that His Essence comprehends the whole with an intellect that is the principle of the whole, not something derived from the whole.”

It is said in reply: This discourse is among the most patently corrupt notions that rational people recognize as false, even though this summary produced by Ibn Sīnā was never reached by any of the philosophers before him; indeed, they were too ignorant to arrive at it.

One may say, first: Is His Essence itself identical with His apprehension of the order of things, or not?

If it is said, “It is identical,” then it follows that His Essence is nothing but the knowledge which is by nature a predicate and an attribute subsisting in another; for knowledge, in relation to the knower, is an attribute inhering in its subject, like an accident in a substance, and from