—namely, the genus of magnitude, or, as they put it, “that in which the three dimensions can be posited”—and something that distinguishes them from one another: each one’s reality and the particular nature of its essence by which it differs from others. Thus, we know that a mountain and a sea share the basic property of magnitude, while knowing that the reality of stone is not the reality of water. This being so, the senses have never perceived an abstract magnitude or an abstract form; they have only ever perceived a body with a particular configuration, a magnitude peculiar to it, and a quality peculiar to it. The imagination, in turn, imagines objects of sense. Nevertheless, it can abstract magnitude from quality, forming within itself a determinate magnitude, or an unrestricted one not characterized by any particular quality. This is the mental conception of dimensions. When an angel is described to someone, he imagines a form in general, with a face and a hand appropriate to it, without imagining its actual reality. Imagining the relation of a particular attribute to the particular thing possessing it is closer to what he has perceived through the senses than imagining an unrestricted magnitude. Imagination follows sense perception, so the closer something is to sense perception, the easier it is to imagine.

This and similar considerations
[مـ]
show that the imagination can very easily represent what he related from his opponents. Indeed, had he said, “The imagination can conceive only of something constituted in this way; it cannot conceive of its being described in the opposite way,” this statement would have been closer to the truth. Indeed, this is the very position upon which rational thinkers, both proponents of affirmation and proponents of negation, have agreed: they agree that conception and imagination cannot conceive of anything existent except as occupying space or subsisting in something that occupies space—namely, a body and its attributes.

Then the proponents of affirmation said: