And since His unlikeness to the world is greater, and distinctness, difference, and the like follow from unlikeness, the further something is from resembling another, the greater its distinctness from it and its difference from it. This requires that His distinctness from the world be greater than the distinctness of any substance or accident from any other substance or accident. If He were distinct from it only in essential reality and time, this would not be so. It is therefore clear that this is false.

The twelfth argument: If He were distinct from the world only in essential reality and time—a distinctness shared by substances and the accidents that subsist in them—His distinctness from the world would involve nothing beyond the distinctness of a substance from an accident. If this greater distinctness is denied, sameness and similarity in respect of distinctness are established. For if each of two things is distinct from whatever it is distinct from only in essential reality and time, then each bears the same relation to what it is distinct from as the other bears to what it is distinct from. His relation to the world would thus be like the relation of created substances and accidents to one another.

The most that can be said is that His reality is more distinct from the reality of anything else than a substance is from an accident, or one accident from another, just as His precedence over the world is greater than the precedence of some parts of the world over others. Nevertheless, if His distinctness belongs to the category of distinctness in essential reality and time, He would not fall outside what is possible for this