The ultimate goal of their philosophy is that the soul attain perfection by becoming an intelligible world that fully corresponds to the actual world. In their view, this is achieved by comprehending the “first philosophy” and the “supreme wisdom,” which, when considered from the standpoint of human knowledge, they call “metaphysics,” and, when regarded in itself, they term “the divine science.”

They assert that its subject matter is Being and the attributes that accrue to it qua Being: its division into necessary and contingent, eternal and originated, cause and effect, substance and accident; the division of substances into five—soul, intellect, matter, form, and body; and, according to the First Teacher, the division of accidents into nine genera, summed up in two lines of verse:

Zayd—tall, black, the son of Mālik—
Yesterday reclined within his house;
In his hand a sword, which he unsheathed and drew—
Behold: ten categories, set apart.

Thus he listed substance, quantity, quality, relation, where, when—namely place and time—position, possession, acting, and being acted upon. Many scholars, however, have objected to restricting them to nine accidents: some reduce them to three, others to five.

The salient point is that the subject of this science is a universal, unqualified notion shared by its various species; for “being,” when divided into necessary and contingent, substance and accident, eternal and originated, is not a specific entity that exists outside the mind. Division (qisma) is of two kinds: the division of a universal into its species and the division of a whole into its parts. In common usage the word qisma refers to the latter, and the Qur’an employs it in this sense, as in His saying: