I say: There are several ways to address this. First, his statement, “We have witnessed only changes in attributes,” does not follow ordinary language or established terminology. Rather, it conveys a false meaning that no one maintains. In established terminology, an attribute is an accident inhering in a self-subsisting substance, as color, taste, and smell inhere in a body. Thus, saying, “We have witnessed only changes in attributes,” would imply that substances and bodies do not change, undergo transformation, or turn into something else; only the accidents inhering in them change, as the sun, moon, and stars change through their movements.

Yet this is plainly false. The substances themselves—which are entities subsisting in themselves—change, undergo transformation, and turn into something else, as in his example of water and soil turning into plants. The change here is not merely in the accidents of water and soil. That would instead be a change such as their being moved from one place to another, gathered together or dispersed, heated or cooled, and the like. But when water and soil become plants, their essential nature has changed and been transformed. The same applies when semen becomes a living creature, an egg becomes a bird, or ingested plants become blood and then bone, flesh, veins, and the like.

In such cases, one cannot say, “We have witnessed only a change in an attribute.” Rather, we have witnessed a transformation of essential nature and a change in self-subsisting entities, which are substances, in the sense that they undergo transformation and pass from one reality to another in their very essence