this with regard to essences in general,” in the case of anyone who affirms essences.

Nor may he say, “My point, then, is that we agree to affirm what conception and imagination cannot accept.” This is invalid for several reasons:

First: There is no distinction between reason, belief, and knowledge; conception, imagination, and supposition fall into the same category.

Second: The disputed point has been said to be known through innate disposition to be rationally impossible, whereas the point of agreement is not so.

Third: The disputed point is known through conception and imagination to be impossible, whereas all that is said of the point of agreement is that conception is incapable of grasping it, as has been explained.

Fourth: Affirming attributes whose modality is unknown for an essence whose modality is unknown is not impossible according to reason, conception, or imagination. What is impossible is the existence of a self-subsisting essence that is neither within the world nor outside it.

Fifth: When the existence of a being neither within the world nor outside it is presented to the innate disposition, it rejects this, repudiates it, and judges it to be nonexistent. But when it is presented with a hand that is not a body, as created beings’ hands are, and knowledge that is not an accident, as created beings’ knowledge is, it does not conclude that it is not understood and known, or that it is known in one respect but not another.

Hence innate disposition recoils from the former in a way that it does not recoil from the latter.

To state the matter precisely: