that an attribute belonging to a subject could in any sense precede that subject—particularly when they affirm an external precedence, though only in an abstract, universal way, like the precedence they attribute to the cause over the effect.

Their argument here, too, is unsound, for nowhere is it ever observed that an agent precedes its act except by a genuine precedence in which the action truly comes after the agent, the very thing they themselves call temporal precedence, whether or not the agent is also labelled a “cause.”

As for the example someone offers—“I moved my hand, and the ring moved”—the hand’s motion is not the efficient cause of the ring’s motion. Rather, the mover of the hand is the same mover of the ring; the ring on the hand is like a finger attached to it. The movement of the palm is not what brings about the movement of the finger; the two simply coincide because of the physical continuity between them.

This has been explained elsewhere, together with the point that the notion they advance of an agent that necessarily acts by its very essence, whose effect is simultaneous with it in time, is something the earliest and the latest thinkers of every rational school have unanimously pronounced false—even Aristotle and his early philosophical followers. Only a small group of later philosophers, such as Ibn Sīnā and the like, upheld it, asserting that a contingent being—one capable in itself of both existence and non-existence—could nonetheless be eternal, without beginning, and necessary through something other than itself.

Such a claim is confined to a mere handful of them. The majority of philosophers, whether those who profess the world’s eternity, like Aristotle and his adherents, or those who affirm its origination, all repudiate it, just as the rest