dead, can no longer regard anything as impossible for the Necessary Existent, since he attributes to Him every attribute found in entities that people regard as created and contingent. Whoever allows Him to be described by everything by which any created and contingent being is described can no longer maintain that He is an eternal cause not subject to change, transformation, or the like, as the Peripatetics describe the Necessary Existent.

Although this view is unsound in many respects, the purpose here is to include it within the classification. For the most basic characteristic of that which necessarily exists in itself is that nonexistence is impossible for it. Yet these people regard what comes into existence and ceases to exist as part of that which necessarily exists in itself.

The root of their error is their assumption that absolute existence exists in external reality. They therefore asserted the oneness of existence—that is, a single existence—not realizing that absolute existence has no existence in