—Abū al-Husayn—and Ibn al-Khatīb, the leader of his followers, have suspended judgment on whether a body is composed of indivisible atoms or not, then the premise on which he bases his argument is one whose validity is unknown even to the foremost authorities of the schools who agree with him. His appeal to their conceding this premise is therefore unsound. At the very least, the premise is disputed: his opponents do not concede that a body must consist of at least two atoms. The dispute over this among the speculative theologians themselves, and among the philosophers as well, is well known. Since he has offered no argument establishing that a body is composite, he has provided no proof at all.

One might object: Those who deny the existence of indivisible atoms maintain that a body admits of division and subdivision without end: every part can be divided further. Thus, on their view, the absence of oneness in a body is even more pronounced.

The reply is: If these people say that the word “one” applies only to what cannot be divided, while maintaining that everything is divisible, then on their view this word has no known, agreed-upon referent at all. For the disputed referent is so obscure and contentious that the word cannot properly be restricted to it, since