Section One: The Causal and Conditional Precedence They Affirm without Temporal Precedence

As for conditional precedence, which they illustrate by one preceding two, one has no external existence set apart from material things. Rather, every unit that exists externally has a reality by which it is distinguished. A person, however, conceives of one in his mind before two, and utters the word “one” before “two.” This is a perceptible temporal ordering.

If his conceptions of one and two are supposed to occur simultaneously, or his utterances of both are supposed to coincide, this is like the coexistence of their concrete instances outside the mind—for example, when one dirham, two dirhams, and three dirhams are present together. There is no ordering here at all: the single dirham does not precede the two dirhams, nor do the two dirhams precede the three.

Someone who says, “The two dirhams cannot exist unless the single dirham exists,” or, “Two cannot exist unless one exists,” should be told: The two dirhams existing outside the mind are independent, in their existence, of the single dirham separate from them. Their existence is in no way conditional upon its existence. Rather, they depend upon their own existence, just as the single dirham depends upon its own existence. Thus, to posit that it precedes the two because two is one and one is no more justified than to posit that it precedes itself because one is one. All this is mistaken. This ordering is of the same kind as composition